Hello dev@streams.a.o, This list has been very quiet for a very long time. I’m hoping to change that, and generate some momentum toward a worth-while initiative right in-line with Streams founding goals.
The project founding proposal [1] includes the following goals: • Publication of Activities from multiple systems via HTTP • Aggregation and syndication of streams • Support for security trimming of streams by social graph • Noise reduction and intelligent filtering • Federation of streams across disparate systems • Provide libraries for easy integration in source systems The code we actually built focused most heavily on goals #2 and #5, and evolved into a (useful IMO, at least around the time of our TLP graduation) java SDK for building complex social media application back-end ’streams’. But, we never shipped software with clear stand-alone utility for anyone other than java developers. The internet, and the social media landscape specifically, has changed a lot since then, and I would argue that the system envisioned in the proposal is needed now more than ever. I won’t go right now into all the reasons I believe that is the case, because it would be TL;DR and off-topic, but will just say that there appears to be an unprecedented (at least in this century) interest in hosting social-media-like software that can inter-operate across installations. So I’m here asking whether anyone is open to a discussion about re-aligning this project to the totality of it’s origin, with a new North Star: • a containerized deployable software stack that provides an Activity Streams 2.0 / Activity Pub interface via rest API • Confirmed interoperable with the Mastodon front-end, and other ActivityPub client software • Built to scale with minimal system admin burden to the needs of the largest existing Mastodon instances: ballpark ~1M total users, 10K concurrent • Able to scale far beyond that for an experienced team: a medium-sized Web 2.0 social network: ~100M total users, up to ~1M concurrent I don’t think it’s hyper-bole to observe that the future of social media is in flux, and in early stages of a 10+ year trend toward decentralization. I for want really want that decentralized future to be based on Activity Streams 2.0 and ActivityPub, now official W3C standards, and thus inter-operable when desired, rather than completely silo’ed like the prior generation. Also I think the above is entirely plausible on a 1-2 year time-scale. Does anyone else agree? Is anyone willing to support a pivot like this, and try to re-build this product and community with me? • [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/incubator/StreamsProposal Steve Blackmon Apache Streams PMC Chair
