After some work, ActivityPub support will be merged into the develop branch of Pleroma in the next days.

This change will add the following user facing features:

• Support for Mastodon’s visibility suggestion settings, like private posts and direct messages.
• Slightly faster federation

Not too much for a few weeks of work. Anyway, here are my thoughts about the whole process.

In my free time, I develop a free software social network server called Pleroma (code). It is compatible with GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, and any other server that implements the OStatus protocol. Recently, there has been some buzz about a new protocol for federated social networking: ActivityPub. This protocol is now a W3C Recommendation, which means that it’s a kind of ‘standard’, if you care about that sort of thing. Here’s my opinion on it, and how it came to be where it is now.