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Comment by pull_my_finger | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my skepticism, but what is the cause of the drive of the current push for ActivityPub? This tech has been around for at least 5 years without much mainstream attention, but within the past couple of weeks it's all over HN.

Is this related to the twitter mess, and Mastodon being a natural successor? Then Mastodon bringing attention to the underlying protocol? Or is there some other less altruistic reason for the push?

Don't get me wrong, I've been following it for several years and I think it's neat, but I just don't trust my social feeds to always deliver content natuarlly and without bias.

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Is the W3C known for astroturfing? I certainly haven't seen a check.

ActivityPub has just kind of been there. A few million people got used to Mastodon and then some of them started to wonder how it works, and that leads them to ActivityPub. So now there's an audience for new and restored articles on it.

No, not W3C that I'm aware of. But I didn't know if it was some kind of gateway into other web3/crypto things that I have been trying to keep blissfully unaware about.

I guess my spidey-sense starts tingling when my feeds get a particular interest that seem untimely/out of place.

There was an attempt to reskin Mastodon as a cryptocurrency-based social network: https://medium.com/we-distribute/hiveway-io-shamelessly-rips...

One of John McAfee's latter pumps.

I am getting paid 8 figures a year from the Mercers & Soros (50-50 split) personally to astroturf MASTODON everywhere, plus another 6 figures a month from a consortium of Fox News and CNN to do similar work.

ActivityPub is Web native, open, modern (JSON-LD), and widely implemented. JSON-LD versus hacky JSON was critical, because it encourages better designs for extensions. And efforts at extending ActivtyPub and ActivityStreams are well under way.[1][2]

[1] https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/m...

[2] https://minipub.dev/

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