· 2 min read
Key learnings from building social apps with ActivityPods
At this year's Solid Symposium, we gave a presentation on the lessons we've learned from building and maintaining several ActivityPods applications since 2022. The result is 14 key learnings that we're glad to share with the Solid community.
We should have been present in Leyden (Holland) to give this presentation and meet again the Solid community, but unfortunately a knee injury prevented us from making the trip. We’re glad we were allowed to do the presentation remotely, though, as we had a lot to share!
Please note that these “learnings” are in fact our personal learnings, or opinions. You are of course free to disagree! Our idea is to open discussions on some important subjects that may (or may not) have been overlooked by the Solid community until now.
You’ll find a re-recording of the talk below:
Synopsis
ActivityPods is a software for creating Solid Pods that can communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol. The first version was released in 2022, with the first application (“Welcome to my Place”) allowing anyone to propose meetings at home.
The special characteristic of this application is that meetings are private by default: it’s the user who chooses whom to invite. They can also give other people the right to share. At the end of the meeting, all participants have the option of adding others to their contacts, enabling the emergence of a network of trust based on real meetings.
This application has been an immediate success in the Compiègne region (north of Paris), where it has been actively used by about five hundred people - at first, without even realizing that the application was based on an innovative architecture!
A second application for posting classified ads (“Mutual Aid”) was released a few months later. Classified ads were also private by default. The users of “Welcome to my Place” were able to use it without having to create a new account or recreate a network.
Both applications are still in use today. There have been attempts to create other social applications, and we’ve also collected a lot of ideas that are waiting for funding. In 2024, we released Mastopod, a Mastodon-compatible application that stores all data in a Pod, as a way to show the ActivityPub community what was possible with Solid.
3 years later, we’d like to share our thoughts on the recipes we believe made this experiment a success, as well as the things that were more difficult. We’ll also give our opinion on certain aspects of the Solid project, on the ActivityPub protocol, and on the web we hope to see in the future.