At FediForum 2026, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou explained why the protocol succeeded by staying deliberately ordinary and why the W3C's Q3 2026 revision needs to keep it that way.
It “won” by being there. It’s technically bad, and the way federation is done is a special kind of stupid when applied at scale. If it was pull-based instead of push-based without changing much else, that alone would have made many federation issue that ACTUALLY HAPPENED impossible, although that alone is not sufficient to make it pass as “good” still.
It “won” by being there. It’s technically bad, and the way federation is done is a special kind of stupid when applied at scale. If it was pull-based instead of push-based without changing much else, that alone would have made many federation issue that ACTUALLY HAPPENED impossible, although that alone is not sufficient to make it pass as “good” still.
Push based and pull when it matters more 🙂