Mastodon uses ActivityPub and now Threads too. What is ActivityPub in simplest terms?
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ActivityPub is a protocol specifically designed for social networks. You should already know what a social network is.
Protocol just means the rules for how two computer systems talk to each other. If you’ve ever visited a website, you’re already using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It’s the format your web browser follows to request a web page from a server like [reddit.com](https://reddit.com), and how the response from that server is sent back to your browser containing the page content to display (HTML etc).
ActivityPub is like that, but rather than a web server and browser talking to each other, it’s two social media platforms talking to each other (server-to-server federation API), or the social media platform talking to a client app (client-server API). In other words, ActivityPub is the ‘language’ (protocol) used by those systems to exchange information.
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