A Creator of ActivityPub on What’s Next for the Fediverse

"Evan Prodromou has been working on decentralized social media for nearly 15 years now, having created an open source Twitter alternative called Identi.ca in 2008. That service morphed a couple of times and eventually became pump.io — which was the genesis for ActivityPub, the core fediverse protocol of 2022.

In an interview with The New Stack, Prodromou talked about how ActivityPub evolved, the pros and cons of Mastodon, and where he sees opportunities for developers in the fediverse."

"“The thing about the fediverse architecture right now that I would like to see evolve into its next step, is that in ActivityStreams [2.0] we defined a client-to-server API. So, similar to say the Twitter API, which is used for creating apps that run on Twitter — like TweetDeck. And we defined a [similar] standard API for ActivityPub. So any ActivityPub server would expose the same API, [so] you could have a TweetDeck that works with Pleroma or with Mastodon or with Pixelfed or whatever. This is kind of interesting in terms of those user-facing apps. But it gets really interesting when you start talking about web apps that interact with each other.”

Currently, the main API for Mastodon is its custom API, which Prodromou thinks limits the creativity for developers wanting to build in the fediverse."