A new way to do social media?

A couple of weeks ago, The Verge published an article by David Pierce that asks the question, Can ActivityPub Save the Internet?

As David Pierce points out in his article, the ActivityPub protocol has the potential for making social media more like email (in a good way). Email is an open protocol. If social media ran like that, you could post on Facebook and your friends on Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok could all see your posts; they could also react to your posts and respond to them.

This could change the way websites work, including this website/blog.

Especially now that WordPress is working on implementing the ActivityPub protocol. Since something like a third of all websites are based on WordPress, that’s a big portion of the web that could wind up being compatible with the ActivityPub protocol. WordPress is also looking at a few other, similar open protocols such as Nostr and the AT protocol, so it seems likely that they will implement some kind of open social media protocol.

This makes me think seriously about installing the ActivityPub plugin on this blog. If I do, you’ll be able to follow this blog from Mastodon, and also from Medium, Tumblr, and Flipboard, all of which are integrating with ActivityPub protocol in various ways.

So… when I can find the time… I’ll install ActivityPub on this blog and see how it goes….