ActivityPub and the End of Walled Gardens, with Evan Prodromou

There was a time where people couldn’t email each other unless they were using the same email client. That changed when developers came up with a protocol that made it so it didn’t matter if you were using AOL or CompuServe or Prodigy — it just worked. 

The same analogy explains how things work in the Fediverse, an open-source system of interconnected, interoperable social networks. The Fediverse is powered by a protocol called ActivityPub, which provides an API for creating, updating and deleting content across several platforms.

What does ActivityPub unlock for product builders and tech entrepreneurs? How will social networks without walled gardens change our relationship to content and to each other? Why does any of this matter? 

In this episode, host Mike McCue talks to Evan Prodromou, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub. Evan is an entrepreneur, technologist and advocate of open source software. He’s also the Director of Open Technology at the Open Earth Foundation. 

Highlights from this conversation include:

• the history of the W3C and ActivityPub
• why the protocol is so important to Evan
• what’s surprised Evan most about its adoption
• why this work is so consequential
• what it will unlock for innovation

🔎 You can follow Evan at https://evanp.me/ and on Mastodon.

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon.

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/