Christine Lemmer-Webber

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Christine Lemmer-Webber
Photograph of Christine Lemmer-Webber.jpg
Born26 September 1984  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website https://dustycloud.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Christine Lemmer-Webber (born 26 September 1984 [1] ) is a software engineer, best known for her lead authorship and co-editorship of ActivityPub. She is currently the Executive Director at Spritely Institute. [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Career

In the early 2000s, Christine was tech lead for Creative Commons. [5]

In 2011, Christine co-founded GNU MediaGoblin, [5] [6] [7] for which she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2015. [8]

Christine was lead author and co-editor of the 2018 ActivityPub standard, [9] a W3C standard for decentralized federated social networking. [5] [10] [11] [12] [13] It is most well-known for being the framework of Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon, Lemmy and PeerTube among others.

She currently works on the Spritely distributed application framework being built by the Spritely Institute. [3]

Personal life

Christine was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and resides in Easthampton, Massachusetts [ relevant? ] as of July 2023. [1] She came out as nonbinary in 2020, and then as a trans woman in 2021. [14]

Christine has been married to Morgan Lemmer-Webber since 2009. [15] The two host the podcast FOSS and Crafts together. [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web Consortium</span> Main international standards organization for the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 5 March 2023, W3C had 462 members. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as X (Twitter), Threads, Tumblr, Mastodon and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.

A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct service providers, such as the Fediverse or the IndieWeb. It consists of multiple social websites, where users of each site communicate with users of any of the involved sites. From a societal perspective, one may compare this concept to that of social media being a public utility.

OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another. The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.

The O'Reilly Open Source Award is presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source. From 2005 to 2009 the award was known as the Google–O'Reilly Open Source Award but since 2010 the awards have only carried the O'Reilly name.

JSON-LD is a method of encoding linked data using JSON. One goal for JSON-LD was to require as little effort as possible from developers to transform their existing JSON to JSON-LD. JSON-LD allows data to be serialized in a way that is similar to traditional JSON. It was initially developed by the JSON for Linking Data Community Group before being transferred to the RDF Working Group for review, improvement, and standardization, and is currently maintained by the JSON-LD Working Group. JSON-LD is a World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MediaGoblin</span> Media hosting software

GNU MediaGoblin is a free, decentralized Web platform for hosting and sharing many forms of digital media. It strives to provide an extensible, federated, and freedom-respectful software alternative to major media publishing services such as Flickr, DeviantArt, and YouTube.

Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evan Prodromou</span> American software developer and open source advocate

Evan S. Prodromou is a software developer and open source advocate. He is a co-editor of ActivityPub, the W3C standard for decentralized social networking used by platforms such as Mastodon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F-Droid</span> Repository for free and open source Android apps

F-Droid is a free and open source app store and software repository for Android, serving a similar function to the Google Play store. The main repository, hosted by the project, contains only free and open source apps. Applications can be browsed, downloaded and installed from the F-Droid website or client app without the need to register an account. "Anti-features" such as advertising, user tracking, or dependence on non-free software are flagged in app descriptions.

pump.io Decentralized social network and protocol

pump.io is a software package containing a social networking service and communication protocol that can be used as a federated social network. Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to his previous microblogging software StatusNet and its OStatus protocol. It is designed to be more lightweight and usable for general activity streams instead of the predecessor's focus on microblogging timelines, with its goal being to achieve "most of what people want from a social network".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PeerTube</span> Decentralised video hosting network

PeerTube is a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform powered by WebTorrent, that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce load on individual servers when viewing videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mastodon (social network)</span> Open source, self-hosted, social media service

Mastodon is an open source, self-hosted, social networking service. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter, and is generally considered to be a part of the Fediverse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fediverse</span> Network of federated social media platforms

The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ActivityPub</span> Decentralized social networking protocol

ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pleroma (software)</span> Self-hosted social networking software

Pleroma is a free and open-source microblogging social networking service. Unlike popular microblogging services such as Twitter or Weibo, Pleroma can be self-hosted and operated by anyone with a server and a web domain, a combination commonly referred to as an instance. Instance administrators can manage their own code of conduct, terms of service, and content moderation policies, allowing users to have more control over the content they view as well as their experience. It was named after the religious concept of pleroma, or the totality of divine powers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pixelfed</span> Open source photo-sharing platform

Pixelfed is a free and open-source image sharing social network service. The platform uses a decentralized architecture which is roughly comparable to e-mail providers, meaning user data is not stored on one central server. It uses the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to interact with other social networks within the protocol, such as Mastodon, PeerTube, and Friendica. Pixelfed and other platforms utilizing this protocol are considered to be part of the Fediverse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lemmy (social network)</span> Open source social media software

Lemmy is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums. These hosts, known as "instances", communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobilizon</span> Open source event planning software

Mobilizon is an open source software for event planning and group management, launched in October 2020 by Framasoft to offer a free alternative to the platforms of GAFAM. Mobilizon gained much visibility in hacker circles relatively fast, but also soon within cultural scene in Europe and more recently in the mainstream IT media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Misskey</span> Open source, federated, social networking service

Misskey is a open source, federated, social networking service created in 2014 by Japanese software engineer Eiji "syuilo" Shinoda. Misskey uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation, allowing users to interact between independent Misskey instances, and other ActivityPub compatible platforms. Misskey is generally considered to be part of the Fediverse.

References

  1. 1 2 "About me". 6 July 2023.
  2. "Meet the Team" . Retrieved 9 January 2024.
  3. 1 2 Schulman, Ross (13 December 2023). "Spritely and Veilid: Exciting Projects Building the Peer-to-Peer Web". Electronic Frontier Foundation DeepLinks. Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  4. "Organizational changes at the Spritely Institute". 25 April 2024.
  5. 1 2 3 "Who are you, and what do you do?". 11 July 2017. Retrieved 9 January 2024.
  6. "Christine Lemmer Webber on MediaGoblin and ActivityPub". 26 May 2018.
  7. Byfield, Bruce (9 October 2012). "MediaGoblin: Saving the Internet Through Federation". Linux Magazine. Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  8. Open Source Awards - OSCON 2015. O'Reilly Media. 24 July 2015. Retrieved 10 January 2024 via YouTube.
  9. Lemmer-Webber, Christine; Tallon, Jessica; Shepherd, Erin; Guy, Amy; Prodromou, Evan (23 January 2018). Lemmer-Webber, Christine; Tallon, Jessica (eds.). "ActivityPub W3C Recommendation 28 January 2018" . Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  10. "Looks Like New: How did open social media platforms originate?". KGNU . 22 June 2023. Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  11. Collier, Kevin (14 December 2023). "Zuckerberg says Threads will dip its toe in the 'fediverse' as it opens to Europe". NBC News . Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  12. Pierce, David (20 April 2023). "Can ActivityPub save the internet?". The Verge . Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  13. Klemens, Ben (1 January 2023). "Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers". Ars Technica. Retrieved 10 January 2024.
  14. "Christine Lemmer-Webber: Transitional reflections". 20 December 2023. Retrieved 9 January 2024.
  15. Lemmer-Webber, Christine (31 May 2010). "1st year anniversary (and an upcoming move)". DustyCloud.org. Retrieved 2024-11-01.
  16. "Announcing FOSS and Crafts". 14 July 2020. Retrieved 2024-11-01.