I can't speak for Julian, but I can talk about my impressions from @boris 's presentation.

He went through a dozen different apps running on the ATProto network that create custom data types and interactions and distribute them through the network. It's all happening on the client side, so these new apps aren't their own PDS servers; they can concentrate on cool client experience and leave the distribution up to the back end.

This is almost exactly parallel to the ActivityPub API. It was cool seeing recipes, check-ins, images, events all being created and managed by server less web clients.

It definitely reenergized me for focusing on the ActivityPub API.

i can't really speak for anyone here as a relative outsider, but as someone that has worked with both protocols i think one big reason is the lack of a public, accessible, synchronous space for discussion, development, and support

the unofficial discord linked in that slide tends to be fairly active - i've managed to receive answers to most of my atproto-related questions there, and as a result i've been able to get stuff done relatively quickly. whenever i've had issues with activitypub projects in the past, i've just sat on them for long periods of time because i wasn't sure where to ask about them (and i never really got much response from posts i made on the network about them either)

i see socialhub as a great place for asynchronous, more formal happenings, but there's not much for more casual happenings right now afaict (though i'd love to be proven wrong in this regard!)

as someone who's also on the outside looking in, I kind of have to concur here. nobody's really having fun. even on socialhub, all I really see is just the same few people people getting really pedantic and argumentative over implementation details and whether rdf is good and where the bike shed for the nuclear reactor should be built. contrast atproto, where people can just be like "I built a toilet social network because it's funny."

I think that activitypub sorely needs more creativity and experimentation and people pushing the protocol in ways that are super unexpected, as well as having developers welcome new people on board and helping them get up to speed (and the casual discussion space that essem mentioned). doing this will probably bring a lot of much needed diversity and progress to the space imo

julian:

I'd love to put some of my creative and cat-herding energies toward developing an implementor-first place for AP developer support

Come help us with the reboot of SocialHub, this is and has always been the vision. I'm 100% on board with making SH more fun! I am after all a member of fediverse.party, and the creator of the Freudian Typo of the Week : P. How about some new categories specifically for new implementers to compare notes, or for things like novelty implementations? We're totally open to ideas.
johannab:

Social Media != Social Network

It's hard to know what to make of this in the absence of definitions of each. From context, I'm guessing that for you Social Media = Datafarming corporate platforms, yes? How would you define Social Networks?

I tend to use both terms in their original usages (circa early 2000s). Where "social media" is open publishing with comments (blogging, vlogging, code forges with built-in bug tracking etc), so anyone can publish media and get rapid feedback. While "social network" covers any tool that enables regular interactions between people who know each other, 1:1 or in bounded groups (email, IM, group chat, web forums, link-sharing, etc).

By those definitions the current fediverse is a mixture of both. It's heavily weighted towards social media, but there's a lot of work being done to extend AP (in FRPs and SocialCG taskforces and elsewhere) so it can offer more social networking features.

To be clear, we don't disagree here, I'm just slicing the onion on a different angle

SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?

(Originally posted in response to @how’s announced ultimatum wrt the future of SocialHub.) Unless a community team steps up, SocialHub will cease to be ..

^SocialHub

strypey:

It’s hard to know what to make of this in the absence of definitions of each.

I recentely tooted my definitions. Maybe they are useful to others:

My definition of social networking is: Any direct and indirect human interaction between people.

Social media then is a particular set of social networking use cases where people publish content to other people to interact with in a variety of ways.

In any case social media are but a small subset of social networking against these definitions.

just small circles 🕊

2025-07-31 14:31:37

My definition of social networking is: Any direct and indirect human interaction between people.

Social media then is a particular set of social networking use cases where people publish content to other people to interact with in a variety of ways.

Interesting. I usually see social networking defined as a subset of social media. The definition of a social network site that's usually referenced is from danah boyd and Nicole Ellison's 2007 paper on Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship:

We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.

By this definition, email, blogs without blogrolls, Signal (where I can't view or traverse others lists of connections) are all examples of social media, but not social networks.

boyd and ellison also talk about the rise of social network sites, including noting that several well-known examples started as non-networked social media:

From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social software analyst Clay Shirky (2003) to coin the term YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service." Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate the early success of Friendster or target specific demographics.... Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).