#dev 2020-12-01

2020-12-01 UTC
[jgmac1106], [fluffy] and jeremycherfas joined the channel
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[jgmac1106] I dig photostack for my image optimization PWA but has a native android app (that just links you to website)
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@theprincessxena So far the only site that is sending me webmentions is @lobsters :( (twitter.com/_/status/1333634738943299584)
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@SaphireLattice ↩️ Webmentions? (twitter.com/_/status/1333645209176076290)
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@theprincessxena ↩️ I specifically mean these: https://indieweb.org/Webmention (twitter.com/_/status/1333747591574671363)
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aaronpk What would be a reasonable way for someone to start publishing stories on their own website?
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aaronpk I realize there's that JSON file format that Zuck.js project reads from
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petermolnar request access token to read story, access token revoked 24h after first use, unlimited use within that 24h?
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aaronpk Oh I'm thinking even before that point
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aaronpk like how would we describe to someone how to set up stories on their website
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petermolnar why would we, though?
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aaronpk maybe a link tag with a rel value to a story endpoint
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petermolnar Shouldn't we first find a use case? :)
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aaronpk I kinda wanna add stories to Monocle now I think it'd be funny
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[KevinMarks] how are stories different from a normal h-feed apart from presentation?
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[KevinMarks] what do yours look like?
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aaronpk Image or video only, no text content for one
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aaronpk It is mostly a presentation difference
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[Murray] I'm interested nowhere seems to do text-based stories so far; seems like that would be a lot more accessible and useful, plus a lot of things like tweets are effectively "useful today, pointless tomorrow" like event updates, reminders, marketing campaigns
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aaronpk but I also wouldn't expect someone to make an html web page that lists all their story posts because that goes against the presentation of stories
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aaronpk [Murray]: whats also interesting is how many stories are screenshots of text 😂
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[Murray] yep, which I feel like validates that this isn't just me being lazy 😄 people do want that ability
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[Murray] to an extent, YouTube's update system works a _bit_ like that, but only in so much as once it drops off your timeline they're near impossible to find again
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aaronpk Oh the posts on YouTube? I think you can get back to them from the channel's community tab
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[KevinMarks] stories isn't a category on your homepage
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[KevinMarks] and presentation is a choice, yes, you could use something like reveal.js to give a story view
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[KevinMarks] this autoplay presentation I made a while back is close http://slides.kevinmarks.com/hict.html#/
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[Murray] [aaronpk] yep, thought that was right, but I don't really see many people engaging with that feature in that way, so they _feel_ more ephemeral (even if they perhaps aren't) 🤷‍♂️
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aaronpk They're also presented inline with videos so very different from the story presentation
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aaronpk I suppose I could just have monocle pull out photos from peoples feeds and show them as stories even tho they aren't 😂
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[eddie] haha nice!
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[eddie] I do feel like odds are a JSON file/feed is the best direction for stories because based on the presentation, they are typically something that will require JavaScript or some native app capabilities
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[eddie] Also, I like the idea of the rel link, because it can point to the same file that the JavaScript on their site points to so you have the same file powering the UI and the Social Reader, which is the goal of the original microformats, that the thing you build for your normal display is also used by readers
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aaronpk Ah good point
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aaronpk I'm also thinking like practically how would we roll this out, we wouldn't want to wait for every blog software to have to build the feature in natively
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aaronpk so using a link rel means someone can even add stories to their static site by delegating the story handling to an external service
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aaronpk then apps for posting them can also post directly to that service
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[eddie] Yeah that makes sense. and ephemeral posts are the best to be willing to use an external service
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[eddie] If it only is supposed to last 24 hours, what does it matter where it's hosted
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aaronpk Haha true
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aaronpk Interestingly YouTube's stories last longer, a few days I think
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aaronpk and they show them to people who aren't subscribed too lol
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[eddie] Oh, also Fleets do support text
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aaronpk orly
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aaronpk Ah I see it puts the text centered on a gradient background
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[eddie] Yep. I took some screenshots to add to the stories page
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[eddie] Uploaded them under Twitter's Silo Example on the story page for future reference
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aaronpk [eddie]++
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Loqi [eddie] has 4 karma in this channel over the last year (7 in all channels)
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[KevinMarks] Fleets don't work on the web, And as I use the web site on mobile too, l haven't seen them
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[schmarty] here's a bit of unasked for finger-waggling but silo design and usage patterns are a bad reason to make stories inaccessible to blind and screen reader users
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[schmarty] screenshots of text still deserve a screen reader friendly alt, silent videos deserve descriptive transcripts, etc.
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aaronpk oh i wasn't suggesting to replicate screenshots of text
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aaronpk i was just saying that's what i see on instagram
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aaronpk i forgot i was going to do a big indieauth push in december. either building the indieauth.com replacement or making a test suite
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vilhalmer a test suite would go along well with the post about the latest spec update :)
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aaronpk true true
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[Raphael_Luckom] test suites are the most useful and least sexy software artifacts ever.
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[Raphael_Luckom] that should be the punishment for any company that has a data breach that exposes customer information: they should be required to sponsor the development of a test suite for an open standard
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[KevinMarks] if you do build a test suite you'll be more comfortable replacing indieauth.com too
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aaronpk also a good point
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[tantek] hah was reading scrollback and just going to say this is unnecessarily limiting "Image or video only, no text content for one", and incorrect in terms of how people actually use IG stories. they also post audio "only" posts (as in the image is an album cover usually on a background, likely semi-automatically generated)
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[tantek] oh yeah all the discussion of formats, rels, JSON etc. for stories are horribly premature
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[tantek] first try to prototype something that actually respects the 24h / expiring nature across two sites. If you can't do that first, you really have no idea what the actual hard parts are for coming up with a protocols, format, JSON etc. and are futzing around with likely trivia (borderline bikeshedding)
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[tantek] like one idea, start with: don't depend on other sites having to actually trust other sites to respect 24h / expiring content, and come up with some other way of displaying/syndicating that content. e.g. perhaps an iframe on the canonical version of it, so then only that one site has to get the 24h expiry etc. right, and it has incentive to do so since that's the author's site!
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[tantek] then a "story reader" could swap the iframe src to switch from one story to the next, either based on a timer, or on the user tapping (to explicitly skip to the next story)
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gRegorLove actual text content in stories (vs images of text) would be an accessibility improvement, too
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[jgmac1106] my idea of the best stories aren't drawn from Instagram and Snapchat, I liked the html layering tools of Mozilla Popcorn and Zeega
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[jgmac1106] can you use a movie with a poster in video and then after 24 hours delete link to video and replace poster with "this story no longer available. Sorry, not sorry"
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aaronpk I may be in the minority here but I really don't think focusing on the technical aspects of making the content expire is super important
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aaronpk I think it's much more about how it's presented to the user
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jacky yeah
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jacky I agree
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aaronpk As has been noted several times, actually stopping people from saving/copying stuff is nearly impossible
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vilhalmer especially stuff displayed in a browser
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[tantek] nah, the "actually ... is nearly impossible" is missing the point of "nearly impossible" is actually good enough for most users to treat it that way
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aaronpk i’m not sure what you mean
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aaronpk i’m saying there isn’t really any point in trying to enforce the expiring aspect in a protocol level, its more important to design the UX around the idea that the content is ephemeral even if its just at regular URLs
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petermolnar sidenote from main chat: we keep calling that page /now but it sounds so much like doing a .well-know/now, which would be horrible. Is there a way to "properly" link a /now with some kind of rel=?
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aaronpk i think the point of those pages is that they are at a well known URL though?
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aaronpk seems to be the trend
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[KevinMarks] so if the reader ignores older content that is effectively expiring from the user pov?
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[KevinMarks] there's a timezone shaped nightmare in here somewhere
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[KevinMarks] so story means 'don't store me'
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[tantek] aaronpk, what I'm saying is "nearly impossible" is a horrible reason to argue against something because rarely (if ever?) do user requirements/expectations map to "nearly impossible". It's a bad way to reason about user feature (in general)
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[tantek] petermolnar, is there a consuming code use-case need for automatic "now" page discovery?
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[tantek] would kinda need such a scenario before bothering with proposing a consuming code method like a rel value
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[KevinMarks] so if the story reader deletes anything more than 24 hours old, thats easier than propogating 410s
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aaronpk it doesn't even have to be that complicated
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aaronpk is it still in the feed? show it, if not, delete it
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aaronpk like how itunes treats podcast feeds
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aaronpk the itunes listing of a podcast will only show episodes if they currently exist in the podcast feed
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[KevinMarks] that will replicate the instagram 'what a cool picture; wait where did it go?' experience as you update after polling
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aaronpk no time-based expiration logic built in to any clients that way
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aaronpk yes that's the goal lol
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[KevinMarks] and RSS feeds are only supposed to have 15 entries anyway
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aaronpk wait what
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[KevinMarks] https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-1-netscape#:~:text=a%20maximum%20of%2015%20items%20per%20channel
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aaronpk wow i never knew that
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[KevinMarks] I think it was relaxed later, but some feed readers still enforce it
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[KevinMarks] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/rss-feed-only-showing-15-most-recent-items/
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jacky wow
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jacky that's like a trivia question tbh
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aaronpk 😂
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[snarfed] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/12/01/Bluesky-Identity nails much of the federated social bingo card: keypairs, ledger and blockchain, new identifier syntax (domain@user), crypto based protocol, new namespace and org to mint names in it, no mention of existing standards except OAuth/OIDC, in passing.
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[snarfed] oh, tim. sigh.
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[KevinMarks] I know far too much about feed formats
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aaronpk [snarfed]: looks like that doesn't even mention all the existing blockchain identity proposals and prototypes :/
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[snarfed] yeah that part isn’t the fun part
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[KevinMarks] http://known.kevinmarks.com/2018/working-with-identity
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[snarfed] KevinMarks++
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Loqi KevinMarks has 14 karma in this channel over the last year (63 in all channels)
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[tantek] oh no snarfed, that's pretty wacky
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[KevinMarks] how about you register a domain and then Cert Transparency puts it in a ledger for you?
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[KevinMarks] I posted a comment for tim
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[KevinMarks] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/12/01/Bluesky-Identity#c1606862650.482660
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[tantek] wait didn't he make fun of blockchain previously?
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[tantek] ah yes: https://twitter.com/timbray/status/963115533825527808
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@timbray 1/ Suffering from disorientation and cognitive dissonance around blockchain and Bitcoin. It’s time to stop the craziness. (twitter.com/_/status/963115533825527808)
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mayakate[m] I don't think I understand what he's trying to solve. It sort of reminds me of https://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html but there, I can see what desired properties the complications get you, and here, I don't
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@andrewmcodes Great post by @swyx https://www.swyx.io/clientside-webmentions (twitter.com/_/status/1333921924372717571)
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[KevinMarks] interesting techy stuff https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-vitess/