After Meta launched threads, I’m stumbling a lot upon the “Fediverse” & “ActivityPub”. I know what an API is and if I understood correctly ActivityPub provides an API (or is ActivityPub the actual API?) but why is it needed? Can’t all companies share their APIs together? What is ActivityPub’s role in all this?
In: 3
Like you’re 20:
ActivityPub is a protocol. It isn’t an API nor provides an API because it doesn’t exist as an instance in any form. Rather, services can choose to adopt the protocol.
Why adopt the protocol? Because it standardizes the user-server and server-server interactions and define what, and how, APIs should look.
User-server example: as a dev, if you want to retrieve user data from a specific service that has adopted ActPub, it’ll be the same format and has the same features as any other ActPub service. You don’t have to look into their self-defense APIs to see if and how you could and would do that.
Server-server example is similar, but from a server-to-server standpoint. Allows for easier communication across disparate services. If a Twatter user wants to follow a Fauxbook user, and both Twatter and Fauxbook adopted ActPub, then the services know what’s possible and how to do it, because both adhere to the protocol. Twatter devs don’t have to maintain dozens of proprietary APIs for all the services they might want to talk to (Fauxbook, ChunkedIn, Next floor, etc.). They’ll all speak the same language in the same way.
Latest Answers