Finally, we have the financing of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) program that the NLnet Foundation distributes, from the European Commission, focused on claiming the public nature of internet. It eases things and allows us to devote some time to improvements that, due to the relatively incipient nature of the protocol and the centralization of the commercial networks of big technology companies, made it difficult to be demanded, so we could extract time reserves in developments in tune with the products and services we offer.
We will work on improvements in the usability of the ActivityPub module of Drupal:
- ActivityPub is the protocol that allows the publication and subscription of activities in a federated way on the Internet, enabling decentralized social networks.
- Drupal is a floss content manager built by the drupal.org community, which grants freedom and flexibility to create digital experiences.
Under the title Drupal ActivityPub module usability enhancements, the objective of our proposal is a connection to the generic fediverse to adapt it to each environment. And to achieve this, we want to build on one of the most powerful, versatile and proven online free content managers: Drupal. It is not a development that we will do from scratch; we work extending the basis of the existing activitypub module, and we do it together with other developers. To allow giving continuity or start a new project completely adapted to the contents and the way of working of your community, organization or family. WordPress, thanks to the effort spent on the activitypub plugin, has also implemented it with similar functionalities.
Drupal is the foundation of many public, private, community, for-profit, or non-profit organizations. Allowing activity between actors and content on the site, and that this is decentralized, is an opportunity that we can not miss in order to provide autonomy with respect to harmful technologies and patterns that can put actors at risk.
It will also allow us to claim sovereignty over the media used and about the own conversations about issues that we live. In short, the usefulness of the connection to the fediverse is an opportunity that we cannot lose in order to draw a better internet in the face of the misconformational collapse that we start seeing on the Internet. It is necessary to recover the future as a reference and restore hope using the tools from which we can have sovereignty in order to adapt them to our environment.
The proposal we have submitted to NLnet and that has been approved, is to improve the user and site builder experience when installing and using the ActivityPub module. We have divided it into 6 tasks that we believe will allow a connection with a less pronounced difficulty curve. The tasks that we will perform during the next year will be:
Improvements in the interaction with other sites (improving the point of interaction, for example, being able to respond with different types of content to adapt to the information architecture itself). Drupal.org issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub/issues/3574481
(Example Draft of content interaction) Improvements in content and activity editor. If the content manager already offers a publisher (ckeditor5) that allows rich text functions and full live integration, we want that usual functionalities such as mentions and labeling are also added, so that the relevant fields are automatically filled in (recipient audience in the mentions or categorization in the labels). Drupal.org issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub/issues/3319290 .
(Proposal to complete mention in the body of text)
- Implementation of C2S, to be able to use generic applications such as clients (for example AndStatus), according to the standardized specification client to server and in consensus proposals rather than in public APIs, but very focused on satisfying specific implementations (such as the one proposed by Mastodon). Drupal issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub/issues/3574483
- Creation of a transport operator, which allows the use of different types of transport of the content to be published in ActivityPub, at the appropriate rate, so that different options can be used. To understand us, we are inspired by what the module mailer plus does to manage different mail transports, which allows us to decide the sending options. Drupal issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub/issues/3574479
Installation Wizard through dialogs, to start with assistance the connection to the fediverse, which allows you to apply recipes according to a set of answers, to better adapt the site and prepare it properly. Inspired by the Wordpress activitypub module quick start dialog (see image). Drupal.org issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub/issues/3574485
(Start-up assistant to install and connect to the fediverse in a Wordpress)
- Finally, improve the documentation, automatically building a website with the documentation each time the module is released. Drupal.org issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/activitypub/issues/3574486
With these tasks, and with which they are being carried out from other projects, we believe that we will join efforts to refuse to lose hope in reappropriating the Internet to meet human needs, build a healthier environment to turn the future around and make it less dystopian, with less base of commodified logic and privatizing and extractive capture of users / consumers in their integrity, whether in patterns of behavior, in knowledge or as advertising objectives.
In the future it will open the doors to new implementations (ours or others) and actions related to the fediverse that we still have to determine, and that we will publish here with the fediverse tag.