To be honest, the main difference is that the public is getting slightly more disillusioned with centralized social media. Mastodon (an ActivityPub-compliant Twitter clone) has gotten a huge influx of new users in recent months due to a bunch of PR missteps by Twitter.

I will admit that the post was intentionally hyperbolic, though. AP doesn't have nearly the adoption threshold it would need to be a serious contender in the social media space. I'm hoping that through articles like these we can spread the word and drive adoption.

But yeah, this has been tried before and didn't really take off. I think the fundamental problem is that it's just way more lucrative to have a centralized social network than a decentralized/federated one. But as I alluded in the post, I think there is a way to build a profitable business on ActivityPub, and that's what it's going to take to make AP mainstream.

> So.. I like this direction, but haven't the "decentralized social network" been tried a few times already? What different this time?

It seems to be all an evolution. Gnu Social -> OStatus -> ActivityPub -> PeerTube.

As all things open source, every few years, a new innovation builds on top of already established communities and tries something new. True, ActivityPub / Masteodon are relatively new, but the roots of the network are well planted in the general Fediverse.

ActivityPub is a W3C recommendation[1], which is further along in maturity than previous open protocols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#Spec...