#indieweb 2017-08-22

2017-08-22 UTC
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amz3`
If my understanding is correct, the notion of time is loose in a distributed network
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amz3`
if say, some one claim posted something @ t0
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amz3`
if say, some one claim posted something @ t1
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amz3`
someelse can as easily claim he posted something @ t0 that is
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amz3`
before
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amz3`
so... time is built in a distributed social network based on pure trust of the participant to behave correctly and properly use timestamps
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Loqi
[superfeedr] "? Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable by Ethan Zuckerman" by Chris Aldrich on 2017-08-20 http://boffosocko.com/2017/08/19/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable-by-ethan-zuckerman/
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amz3`
you can verify the time something was posted, except if you keep track of the whole distributed system
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amz3`
at some point
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amz3`
the only thing that you can keep track of, i think, is *precedence*
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KartikPrabhu
amz3`: what is the use-case?
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aaronpk
i suppose so? that seems like overthinking it
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KartikPrabhu
i simply trust the timestamp of the replies I get because I don't see the downside
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KartikPrabhu
what is reply?
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Loqi
A reply (or comment) is a kind of post that is a text (typically, though photos are possible too) response to some other post, that makes little or no sense without reading or at least knowing the context of the source post https://indieweb.org/reply
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amz3`
Even precedence, can not be trusted, you can reply to a post that doesn't exist yet...
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amz3`
maybe i am overthinking it
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KartikPrabhu
amz3`: I don't see a use case for this level of "trust"
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amz3`
my point, is that there is not interest in keeping track of time in distributed social network
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GWG
Evening
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KartikPrabhu
amz3`: maybe, why should there be unless there is a use-case for it
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aaronpk
the one thing i find interesting about this idea is that when you want to "prove" to someone that you posted something on a certain date you can really only do so by pointing to a copy of it somewhere where you are unable to modify the creation date, e.g. a twitter copy or web.archive.org
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aaronpk
like if i said "i totally said this thing 5 years ago" and sent you a link to a post on my site, you have no reason to believe it
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KartikPrabhu
aaronpk: you can modify a twitter copy by deleting it and writing anothre tweet with a different time
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KartikPrabhu
also again what is the use-case for such a "proof"?
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aaronpk
KartikPrabhu: well the trick on twitter is to set an account to private, write multiple tweets with different outcomes, then delete all but the desired tweet and make the account public
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KartikPrabhu
aaronpk: yup also that
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aaronpk
i can't remember off-hand but i have definitely seen examples of people referencing old tweets to make a point about when something was claimed
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KartikPrabhu
also I write posts with a futured publish date which counts as a draft and people with the URL can still reply to it even though it isn't published yet!
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amz3`
KartikPrabhu: the use case, is in science for instance, to tell whoever made the discovery first
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KartikPrabhu
amz3`: even current publishing does not guarantee that
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amz3`
agree
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KartikPrabhu
unless you trust the publisher who can use any date they please
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amz3`
it's might explain so many paper don't have dates
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amz3`
*why so many *papers
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KartikPrabhu
you can't even guarantee that a printed book was actually published on the date printed in it
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amz3`
yes
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amz3`
what matters is what comes next, who links to your published asset and the trust that is around it
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amz3`
if time is dubbed significant
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KartikPrabhu
amz3`: I still don't see why it "matters"
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amz3`
I am trying to build a "static" social network on top of git.
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aaronpk
can't you fake timestamps in git too?
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amz3`
I am building a file based database that is stored in git
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amz3`
the file based database is happend only
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amz3`
s/happend/append/
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amz3`
yes you can
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amz3`
fake timestamps in git too
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amz3`
but I was wondering how I could create an UX with time that can be fake
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amz3`
considering time can be fake
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amz3`
and basicaly, since time can not be trusted, I can not rely on time to create "list of posts"
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KartikPrabhu
amz3`: when someone hits publish you automatically use the current time
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KartikPrabhu
don't let user select the published time
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amz3`
the whole database is shared among participant, i don't control what they put in the database, only that they can't modify old entries
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aaronpk
there are two timestamps to consider when building a /reader ... the time the post self-reports as the published time, and the time the reader found it. if you want to show the user a list of things they haven't seen yet, use the time the reader time. if you want to show a list of things in supposedly chronological order, show the published time
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amz3`
aaronpk: that's interesting
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amz3`
aaronpk: I was thinking about: “the reader time”
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amz3`
keeping track of what's new/fresh in the social network and focus on that
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amz3`
I mean use that information to display things
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amz3`
tx
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amz3`
I think, I won't include publication time, it will be too confusing
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amz3`
since it can not be trusted
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amz3`
I made good progress on this project, I started it like... 2 or 3 years ago
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amz3`
tantek seemed interested but then I got side tracked
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amz3`
maybe this time I can make it happen
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amz3`
the idea behind that, is to have some kind of collective work that is never in the hand of a single person
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amz3`
well silos... you know the story
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amz3`
it was delight to discuss with you
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amz3`
tx
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[kevinmarks]
This problem of public timestamping is solved by Bitcoin, but at a very high cost
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aaronpk
no, that system just has different tradeoffs
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aaronpk
for example you *can't* backdate things, which sometimes is a thing i want to do
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[manton]
In Micro.blog I use the published date reported by the blog and sort on that. I had planned to do more checking to ensure the dates aren't wildly off, but in practice it hasn't been a problem yet. (Checking that they aren't in the future would solve most problems.)
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aaronpk
yeah in practice people don't actually try to mess with timestamps for this stuff
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[manton]
This is also related to post editing, which I think has more potential for abuse.
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aaronpk
i think the most likely error is around timezones. like forgetting to include a timezone offset and using only the local time.
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[manton]
Yep. There are several places that timezones can be off in a platform like this.
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Loqi
[superfeedr] "? Pivot time: searching for an Open Web blogging model | AltPlatform" by Chris Aldrich on 2017-08-18 http://boffosocko.com/2017/08/18/pivot-time-searching-for-an-open-web-blogging-model-altplatform/
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Loqi
[superfeedr] "Packing day three: Oban 14" by Chris Aldrich on 2017-08-21 http://boffosocko.com/2017/08/21/packing-day-three-oban-14/
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mblaney
there's another way to possibly solve the timestamp issue, you could ask a 3rd party to store the timestamp and link to the post you want verified.
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mblaney
if others trust the 3rd party, great. if not, add more 3rd party sites to do the verification.
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mblaney
would work for the whole content of the post too, just store a hash and verify that hasn't changed.
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aaronpk
That sounds like an interesting service
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mblaney
yeah I put some thought into it for my distributed payment system thing.... will get to it one day :-P
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sknebel
good morning indieweb!
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sknebel
reading logs, there is a bunch of existing stuff for timestamping
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sknebel
e.g. signed executables generally have to have not only a a signature, but only a signed timestamp proving *when* they were signed (which really just is the person creating the binary going to a trusted authority and saying "here is a signature I'm attaching to my file, could you please sign a statement saying when you've seen it", which is then attached to the file as well)
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sknebel
certificate transparency logs have interesting properties in that regard as well (they don't explicitly contain timestamps, but they are logs where you can detect changes to the history)
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[kevinmarks]
You could use archive.org to do this. Or hash archive or https://metrognomo.com
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cweiske
oh. nobody wants linkback support in stackoverflow: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355408/282601
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cweiske
+5/-16
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sknebel
also interesting the suggestion in the opposite direction and the assumption that it would "have to be" an annoying notification
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elie
cweiske: I backed you up
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petermolnar
!tell rhiaro is it possible to use aleph as a search engine for our sites? If yes, had anyone done it so far?
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Loqi
Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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KartikPrabhu
what is aleph?
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Zegnat
Good morning IndieWeb
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KartikPrabhu
what is aleph?
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Loqi
It looks like we don't have a page for "aleph" yet. Would you like to create it?
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Zegnat
cweiske, not a lot of feedback on why they do not like linkback though :/
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rhiaro
petermolnar: aleph indexes documents like pdfs, emails, spreadsheets, and provides a frontend for sorting documents and extracted entities (people, companies, land) into collections, and cross-referencing them against other collections to see if there are overlaps. You could download a static copy of your website and have an instance of aleph ingest it, but.. I don't know why you would.. that's nto what it's for
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Loqi
rhiaro: tantek left you a message on 2017-03-30 at 1:23am UTC: can you make it to any of the dates here? add your prefs! https://indieweb.org/Planning#Summit
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Loqi
rhiaro: petermolnar left you a message 5 minutes ago: is it possible to use aleph as a search engine for our sites? If yes, had anyone done it so far?
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petermolnar
I was thinking of feeding a lot of extras beside the text to it, exif data in json, csv from sensors, etc, but that's a completely different use case; thanks :)
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rhiaro
when we want to ingest already structured data sources we have to map them from the existing structure to aleph's ES data model. It's arbitrary, you might as well make your own ES backed thing that's more customised to your use case
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jeremycherfas
Good morning IndieWeb
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jeremycherfas
I saw someone else reading this https://static.land yesterday and thought it might be of interest here, but not sure where in the wiki to put it.
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sknebel
access to the hosted version seems limited, so not sure how well it fits
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jeremycherfas
OK then. I’ll leave it for now.
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j4y_funabashi
morning all
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[kevinmarks]
I'm a bit grumpy that ethan and Co wrote about decentralized web without covering indieweb http://dci.mit.edu/decentralizedweb
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Zegnat
[kevinmarks], maybe because of a bias towards self-contained platforms like Mastodon? IndieWeb doesn’t really show well as a solid network. We’re just people with websites that talk to each other.
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Zegnat
It is interesting SOLID is mentioned on the list there (I haven’t read the whole thing). Are there actual websites implementing any of the SOLID stuff?
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petermolnar
decentralized == fragmented variety of random sofwware that can talk to eachother; this is what's missing from 99% of decentralization efforts
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Loqi
[Colin Walker] Federated, decentralised or distributed
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Zegnat
Hiya sl007
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Zegnat
Also, morning j4y_funabashi, almost missed you there!
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[colinwalker]
@Zegnat - glad you found that useful ?
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[colinwalker]
And I've just spotted a typo ?
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Zegnat
I am not completely sure how useful though, [colinwalker], I still doubt at times what word should be applied to what idea ;) But that’s probably just the nature of it
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petermolnar
"Back to the Future: The Decentralized Web" - new on AWS!
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[colinwalker]
Yeah, it's a bit vague and I don't think always applied properly.
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sknebel
hm, I have to re-read that again after some more food and coffee
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[colinwalker]
A **lot** of coffee!
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Zegnat
That should be a warning on top of some posts “Lots of caffeine required”
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sknebel
wrote my initial ideas down, will re-read later and figure out if they still conflict with your post or not ;)
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j4y_funabashi
hey Zegnat, hows things?
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Zegnat
Pretty good, getting some work rolling. All fine over there j4y_funabashi?
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j4y_funabashi
yeah good, making progress on my new micropub client / reader
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j4y_funabashi
have got the happy path for login, posting notes + photos and displaying a feed of posts from your micropub server working :)
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j4y_funabashi
I had to modify my micropub server to return a list of posts on the q=source endpoint if no url is provided
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sl007
Zegnat - it is somehow scary that nobody put their name to the Guest List of https://indieweb.org/2017/Dortmund ? CAMPFIRE - Festival for journalism
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Zegnat
the guestlist where, on the wiki?
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Zegnat
j4y_funabashi, it is going to be fun to see clients that will actually display old posts as well!
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sl007
I mean 5000 people will attend the festival but on the other side there are 38 other workshops and how many will attend ...
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sknebel
sl007: people outside the community very likely won't edit the wiki
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Zegnat
sl007, I think too few of the active IndieWeb wiki/IRC users can make it :( And journalists actually there are less likely to login to the wiki to add their names
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sl007
And the first point is what makes me :(
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sl007
sknebel - looking at you !
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Loqi
*sniff*
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sl007
also - if anybody comes to your mind living "west coast"
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Zegnat
Of the US? San Fran is west right, so tantek and everyone who attends the SF HWC come to mind
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sknebel
of germany I assume ;)
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sknebel
sl007: did you have joschi retweet an announcement or something? quite a few people that were at other camps probably don't really check the wiki or anything, but might see it there
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j4y_funabashi
Zegnat: yeah definitely
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Zegnat
Oooh, Germany’s West Coast. The Netherlands then ;)
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sl007
Zegnat - sorry for the joke … Yes, there are a few thing the Dutch did better like, well, building coasts ;)
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cweiske
they don't have anything else :)
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sl007
OK, fun fact - meanwhile received a mail "I checked in via sched, do i have to add me to the guest list" - no idea where I can see who "checked in via sched" (which is the festivals system)
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Zegnat
Do you have any numbers on how many people have checked in via sched at all? Maybe just add the number to the wiki?
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sl007
Zegnat - yeah, just got it - the number is 5 (five)
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sl007
Gimme 5
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sl007
I'll add them to the Guest List now - oh wait the next mail is saying I should become a bitcoin millionaire ;)
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sl007
ups, now it is 6
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sl007
They opened their workshop registrations on Saturday …
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schmarty
good morning, indieweb!
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Loqi
petermolnar has 29 karma in this channel (46 overall)
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Loqi
[petermolnar] decentralized == fragmented variety of random sofwware that can talk to eachother; this is what's missing from 99% of decentralization efforts
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Loqi
ahahaha
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schmarty
aaronpk++ for the Loqi triple-action combo
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Loqi
aaronpk has 524 karma in this channel (1414 overall)
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snarfed
https://atomenabled.org/ is still half broken and spammed, and emails to mailto:rfc822%3Bwebmaster@atomenabled.org bounce. sad.
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aaronpk
who maintains the site?
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aaronpk
i guess this is what whois was supposed to tell us
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Zegnat
Could it be Sam Ruby? The page links to the Atom wiki, which he hosts
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[kevinmarks]
likely Sam yes
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[manton]
Do any of the other HWC cities use meetup.com or mailing lists to help coordinate event times, or is mostly just on the wiki and individual blog posts / tweets? Someone asked if there was a list for Austin, so want to make sure what we're doing is consistent with other cities.
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sknebel
[manton]: we use meetup.com, because that's the place to be for tech meetups in Berlin (sadly, not a fan of it)
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sknebel
general consensus from a HWC organizers session was that the wiki is primarily community-internal documentation and has basically no outreach value for HWC (even if people stumble over it, they then also have to look at HWCs carefully enough to notice there is a local one, ...), to use whatever works locally and that by far the most effective thing is directly contacting/inviting people via e-mail, twitter or in person
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[manton]
@sknebel Got it, thank you. I like starting with a mailing list for anyone interested, but meetup.com is popular here too and probably worth looking at. (I don't use it much myself either.)
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sknebel
meetup is annoyingly expensive, but got at least a few people
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[miklb]
need indieweb friendly sponsors?
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[miklb]
not that I have an option for that, but wondering if something worth adding to /donate page or the like
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sknebel
we'll have to evaluate if we need it that badly once our subscription runs out
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sknebel
really not a fan of spending money on them, even if it isn't mine
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sketchess
Good morning Loqi, good morning Indieweb.
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gRegorLove
Good morning, #indieweb
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sketchess
Welcome gRegorLove. :)
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@sl007
@LiquidNewsroom Ein charmanter workshop https://indieweb.org/2017/Dortmund ? beim CAMPFIRE Festival für Journalismus !
(twitter.com/_/status/900060916875747329)
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[jeremycherfas]
!tell manton No sign of an update the the micro blog app beta.
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Loqi
Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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[manton]
jeremycherfas Actually the beta isn't being updated anymore! You can delete it and switch to the App Store version. The App Store version has a bunch of improvements since the beta.
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Loqi
[manton]: [jeremycherfas] left you a message 34 minutes ago: No sign of an update the the micro blog app beta.
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[manton]
(If I had planned things a little better, I would've made the beta automatically notify you about the new version. Sorry about that.)
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[jeremycherfas]
manton. Oh. I had no idea. Will do that.
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[manton]
Great, let me know if you have any problems.
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GWG
Afternoon
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ben_thatmustbeme
waves to manton
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[manton]
ben_thatmustbeme Hello!
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ben_thatmustbeme
how goes everything with micro.blog
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[manton]
Going well, thanks. Still a lot to do, but we're making improvements all the time, getting closer to a public launch.
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ben_thatmustbeme
btw, jf2 now has a merged jsonfeed/jf2 profile
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ben_thatmustbeme
i actually got a mime type for it
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ben_thatmustbeme
woah, later than i realized
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ben_thatmustbeme
gotta go catch a train
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snarfed
ben_thatmustbeme++
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Loqi
ben_thatmustbeme has 100 karma in this channel (254 overall)
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@schmarty
Here's an interview with @macgenie from the most recent This Week in the #IndieWeb. ? Full Episode:… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/900117568849158144
(twitter.com/_/status/900117568849158144)
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