#dev 2021-03-24

2021-03-24 UTC
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aaronpk so i just realized there's no way to unfollow someone in activitypub without explicitly telling them
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aaronpk like there's no way to silently disappear unless you are willing to continue to receive their activitypub delivery posts and ignore them, which is ... not scalable
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aaronpk in the real world, if I want to unfriend someone, I don't walk up to their face and say "we're not friends anymore", i would just stop texting them or whatever
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aaronpk so in the software version of this, ideally I want to initially: anonymously follow someone to see what they're saying, then i might later decide to explicitly tell them i'm following them (maybe then also getting "friends-only posts"), and then later quietly disappear without telling them
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Ruxton activitypub suffers from "friends" being encapsulated as a two-way street, like diaspora did
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[tantek] IMO this is part of the problem with explicit follow/unfollow in protocols, it doesn't match social behavior / UX / expectations
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Ruxton its funny because, anyone researching how to do this properly in the last 20 years, would not have done that.
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Ruxton some yahoo guys wrote all about it in a book on constructing social networks
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Ruxton lessons from flickr
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[tantek] nah, it's much more of a pattern of programmers designing things from the protocol upwards, rather than first considering user behaviors. Flickr was a notable exception, and for the most part nearly no one learned from their example
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Ruxton which is sad, because htey did A LOT of research
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[tantek] there are multiple problems actually. the "plumbing first" attitude / ignorant of actual user behavior is only the first problem
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jacky Ruxton: wait do you know that book?
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Ruxton arguably they didnt evne learn from them *looks at flickr now*
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[tantek] the second is, even user behaviors can be bad / unfriendly / toxic (per social media etc.)
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Ruxton jacky: just digging it up now
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jacky thank you
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jacky def would be interested in reading that
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[tantek] so the challenge is two part (which Flickr kinda did), study users and natural behaviors, then design UX to amplify the *best parts of those behaviors* (and protocols accordingly), and put up barriers to the worst parts of those behaviors
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Ruxton one was Building Web Reputation Systems by Randall Farmer
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[tantek] or rather two categories of mistakes are possible.
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Ruxton O'Reilly book - ISBN 9780596159795
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[tantek] 1 plumbing first. hey this is easy to code and a "simple" model so I'll build it and then adapt a UI accordingly.
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aaronpk wait this is important
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jacky gotcha
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jacky thank you
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aaronpk > design UX to amplify the *best parts of those behaviors*
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aaronpk > put up barriers to the worst parts of those behaviors
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jacky lol sounds like the synopsis to get from it
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[tantek] 2 user intention neutral. hey this is what users want/do, let's design UX exactly for what the research says they want!
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aaronpk are there examples of websites that have done this successfully?
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[tantek] oof actually as of the past decade there's a third "mistake" which is not really a mistake but more antipathy
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[tantek] 3 user value extraction driven. hey this is what will get users to engage, click, return, post, share, let's design UX to amplify all of these things which are somehow tied to extracting more time, money, etc. from users
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jacky aaronpk: I really can't think of too many that has
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Ruxton flickr used to be really good at it
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Ruxton but at some point its funding dwindled and they stopped listening
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[tantek] aaronpk "i would just stop texting them or whatever" potentially falls into trap 2. people do all sorts of things to each other than are potentially harmful (e.g. ghosting), and there is a strong adversarial/individualistic western society default of both "everyone is responsible for their own whatever", and "burning bridges rather than repairing them", and "let's cancel people that upset us"
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Ruxton its a constant cycle, whats working this week is not where it's going next year
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aaronpk i'm just thinking like realistically relationships take work, and if both people stop doing the work, the relationship dwindles
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jacky ghosting is more of an abusive angle though no - when someone does it to 'control' the lane of communication versus what I think aaronpk's mentioned (someone else is being noisy/disrespectful/$UNWANTED_BEHAVIOR) so you choose to stop communication with them
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[tantek] in these cases, it takes even more deliberate design to not only "amplify the *best parts of those behaviors"* but also project forward from that, perhaps enabling / empowering *even* better behaviors that people didn't feel like they had the tools (or safety) to do
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[tantek] jacky, agreed, and in that case, I'd categorize more as setting/holding boundaries rather than abuse
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jacky yup true
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aaronpk now that we're at the anniversary of the pandemic, i'm thinking of the people who i'm realizing now that I haven't talked with in the past year
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[tantek] aaronpk, YES, *relationships take work*! and a good UX can *reduce* the necessary work to do so!
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aaronpk it's not like i intended to "block" or "ghost" on them, but that's just what has happened
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Ruxton aaronpk: a friend came over the other day and I hadn't seen them in over a year and it's normally someone I'd see a lot
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[tantek] good UX can also encourage de-escalation, repair, etc.
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Ruxton and I',m prob in one of the best places in the world for lack of lockdown/covid problems
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[tantek] sometimes mutual misunderstanding can occur out of nothing or out of absence, when there may have been mutual positive intentions
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[tantek] to add to the good UX list there, continuous consent
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[tantek] not cookie consent; I'm talking about interpersonal consent
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[tantek] and no none of that blockchain consent garbage
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[tantek] tools to help people navigate and engage in consent, not tools in a vain attempt to "guarantee" or "prove" consent (all that stuff is garbage and pretty antithetical to actual consent)
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[KevinMarks] Randy Farmer is someone I haven't heard from in too long
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@edelman215 In other news, my WebMention integration is working like a charm! cc @MHillestad (twitter.com/_/status/1374550895183151105)
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Ruxton [KevinMarks]: smart guy, the book was very helpful
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tomlarkworthy @chrisaldrich ok I am about to break ground on an Observable integration. Do you have any pointers on what you would like to see? Its pretty trivial to host a webpage with the rel=me etc. links on Observable.
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tomlarkworthy but what seems more difficult is building a service and getting a working service client going
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doosboox I need some tips and inspiration. I'm considering doing a demo of how to go from nothing to your homepage on your own domain in ten minutes. What tools and providers would you suggest to try it with? I'm thinking 1) free domain from freenom, 2) cheap VPS from ramnode.com, 3) ... (linux image + nginx or apache? Plain html page or SSG?), 4) profit!
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doosboox It would of course be *awesome* if some indieweb stuff could be included too, but I don't think that's feasible in ten minutes
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Zegnat doosboox: it really depends on the level of the audience. Do you really need to introduce a VPS and linux images? You could also start off with something like forking https://github.com/indieweb/blank-gh-site, adding a CNAME file for the free domain, and showing how you can immediately have something up with GitHub
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Zegnat I believe someone did a GitLab copy of that too, trying to find it now
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Loqi [indieweb] blank-gh-site: Setup a simple new indieweb site on a domain name in mere minutes with this project.
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doosboox Zegnat: that's even better!
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doosboox Might need to tweak it a bit; there's references to indieauth.com in there
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Zegnat If the audience isn’t on for learning to write HTML yet (which you can do all within GitHub, don’t actually need to use git) there are probably other options like signing up for WordPress or even Tumblr and pointing a domain there. Or something like micro.blog
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doosboox I'm assuming a noob audience, and I'd say the goal is to show them an easy way to run a website you own yourself
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doosboox Zegnat: Is there a general consensus on what "owning your content" means within the indieweb community? I don't know what wordpress or tumblr ToS look like.
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Zegnat I think there are a lot of different interpertations of owning your content going around. I think something that most would agree on is permanence of URLs. Maybe. WP I think always offers full exports, so you can move between different hosting providers with your content, and then if you control a domain name you can make sure your content is still at the same URL.
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doosboox makes sense
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doosboox I'm probably in the extreme. I'm lucky enough that my ISP offers public IPs, which means I can host everything on my RPi
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Zegnat You can keep stretching that, e.g. at some German IWC events I have been at there have been discussions about owning DNS in your home as well. But a lot of us are pretty pragmatic on ownership, as long as there is export and you can personally move it around and back it up, that is already great.
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[KevinMarks] you can write markdown with github pages; i think the point of that was teaching minimal html
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[schmarty] What is freenom?
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "freenom" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "freenom is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[schmarty] What is a domain registrar?
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Loqi https://indieweb.org/domain_registrar
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[schmarty] I thought I recalled freenom having some drawbacks here: https://indieweb.org/personal-domain#Domain_Registrars
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[schmarty] doosboox: a major challenge to teaching how to set up a website in a very short amount of time or with very few resources is making sure folks understand how to maintain it and build on it
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[schmarty] Otherwise the sites tend to be forgotten and unused
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[schmarty] Domains expire and get squatted etc
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doosboox [schmarty]: that's true. Hard to fit into a ten minute slot, though :)
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doosboox And yeah, definitely don't use freenom if you expect your site to become hugely popular (have heard that hugely popular domain names get reclaimed and 'held hostage') or want to email from it
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[schmarty] That sounds like a major caveat and something folks should be aware of before giving control over a domain name they care about to freenom
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doosboox yup!
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doosboox has two domain names on freenom; one for a gemini capsule and one that isn't used atm
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doosboox My main site is .se
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doosboox the domain name can often be a major cost. You can always get free hosting somewhere, or your own VPS for $3/mo (which I guess is pretty costly in the long term -- $36/y)
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doosboox Most "proper" domains are ~$10/y
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doosboox it's somehow ironic that .gratis is a mid-range cost domain and not free :D
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Zegnat I am a big fan of family domains. So there is a clear use for more people than just one, and cost can potentially be spread around.
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Zegnat But yeah, you could probably fill a 10 minute talk slot just with domains, easily
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doosboox haha, yeah
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doosboox I use a family domain, but I'm the only one on it :D
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doosboox It used to be bjorn.warmedal.se/, but I've changed it to warmedal.se/~bjorn/ because it means I can add more users without having to deal with new certificates
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Zegnat I actually have family members on separate subdomains because it was easy to point at entirely different services. But am myself on a folder (vanderven.se/martijn/)
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@triptych https://indieweb.org/Webmention (twitter.com/_/status/1374729449061511173)
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[snarfed] https://chat.indieweb.org/2021-03-24/1616590101994600
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Loqi [[kimberlyhirsh]] Micro.blog + domain is a pretty simple set up, especially for somebody new.
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[schmarty] kimberlyhirsh++ more karma 😄
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Loqi kimberlyhirsh has 1 karma in this channel over the last year (4 in all channels)
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[snarfed] strongly agreed. micro.blog is our current community recommendation for new users, for good reason. https://indieweb.org/web_hosting#Custom_domain_silos
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[snarfed] (ie *not* VPS, SSG, etc)
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jeremycherfas Anyone care to recommend a getting started with Jupyter tutorial?
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sknebel I'll ask some friends who might know one
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jacky [schmarty]: do you have an approach to 'protecting' pages on your site? like .htpasswd but not exactly that? lol
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[schmarty] jacky: dang, man, i really want to and i just haven't done the work to choose a solution. lololol
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jacky this is something I've been _really_ thinking about the last few days
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jacky like as far as adding a <meta http-equiv="www-authenticate"> in the page, lol
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[schmarty] my site is just static files built by hugo. closest thing i have to "protected" is just unlisted stuff.
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jacky (I can check but) is it possible to 'swap' a page out by a particular property?
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jacky because I'm thinking like if it detects a post that's meant to be protected, it can make a generic page that'd show a request to auth and then redirect to a unguessable URL that'd actually have the content
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[schmarty] definitely possible to set up your templates to render different stuff (or nothing at all) based on properties.
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jacky oh interesting
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[schmarty] jacky: i'd have to double-check the unguessable-URL-making-bits but i think it should be possible. i think that's the closest thing i could get to protected pages. throw in some JS (service worker?) for folks that log in to fetch or decrypt or whatever that data. some complications there!
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jacky yeah - I want it to be something that can run with no JavaScript (just a bunch of redirecting) but Javascript can help with the browser experience
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jacky okay, that might be enough concept-wise for me (unguessable URLs are really the only option - I'd even suggest changing it with every deploy)
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[schmarty] oh yeah a redirect is a neat idea.
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jeremycherfas Thanks sknebel; not urgent, as you can imagine.
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[scojjac] @doosbox to me, owning means easy exportability - squarespace exported as wordpress, tumblr was easy to export, and there are so many plugins to import to wordpress
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[scojjac] i think up in 10 minutes would rule out a VPS for many people
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[scojjac] [Zegnat] I _love_ the idea of a family domain but I can't say I've found a good one for either of my last names.
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[Murray] ^ heh, this. My last name falls foul of the Scunthorpe problem, family has never been able to agree on a collective pseudonym, so yet to get that rolling 😄
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sknebel same-ish. little of the family that shares names
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@mgdm Do IndieWeb technologies (webmention, web sign in, etc) get much use? I have seen a lot of microformats around but not heard a lot about the other parts (twitter.com/_/status/1374837549831745544)
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@schnarfed ↩️ yes! you may be interested in https://indiemap.org/ and https://snarfed.org/1-million-webmentions (twitter.com/_/status/1374848922959503368)
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@MarcLittlemore ↩️ I just implemented webmentions on my blog after reading about them. Only server-side at build time for a static site. Not sure how popular they are though. (twitter.com/_/status/1374848508117782535)
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[tantek] snarfed++ indiemap++
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Loqi indiemap has 1 karma over the last year
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Loqi snarfed has 29 karma in this channel over the last year (62 in all channels)
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