#dev 2023-10-20

2023-10-20 UTC
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[KevinMarks] https://void.rehab/notes/9kyvsl1ktsfz2red
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sknebel although some implementations have features that mastodon doesnt understand
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[catgirlinspace] sad that no other implementations support the misskey isCat flag :(
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[tantek] what is misskey
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "misskey" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "misskey is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[tantek] Misskey is https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey a [[microblog]]ging open source [[project]] that has support for [[ActivityPub]] and has many instances that you can browse using the [https://join.misskey.page/ Joinmisskey] service.
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Loqi ok
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[tantek] well there's a new page for the week at least
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[tantek] which a few other pages already linked to
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[manton] [KevinMarks] Good post, thanks for pointing to that. It sounds a little harsh but it’s pretty accurate.
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[manton] I wish we could take the suite of ActivityPub-related specs and streamline them into a more cohesive, single spec, trimming out anything that isn’t actually needed like JSON-LD, fields that no server has ever implemented, etc.
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[tantek] [manton]++ agreed, I think we need a slimmed down ActivityPub to encourage more implementations and more reliable interop
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Loqi [manton] has 18 karma in this channel over the last year (44 in all channels)
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[manton] I guess that’s similar to LitePub, but maybe that never got off the ground?
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[manton] What is LitePub?
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Loqi litepub is a static blog generator written in Go (on GitHub) and also a nascent effort to define a "protocol suite" based on a stricter subset of ActivityPub (protocol overview) https://indieweb.org/litepub
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[manton] Whoops, not that one.
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[tantek] right, LitePub was an implementation-based effort to figure out a subset of ActivityPub
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[manton] (Oh, I didn’t read the full description… Yes, https://litepub.social/litepub/ is what I meant.
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[tantek] [manton] perhaps file an issue about considering a "streamlined Activity pub, trimming out anything that isn’t actually needed like JSON-LD, fields that no server has ever implemented, etc." on the ActivityPub spec repo and see if it can get some agreement? (as a direct implementer & provider of AP, it will be more credible coming from you) https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues
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[tantek] the "the suite of ActivityPub-related specs" is a much harder problem IMO. at least we can fix the pieces to start with
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[manton] [tantek] Thanks. I will try to set aside some time for that.
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[tantek] That way we can at least capture the "let's simplify this" issue/goal and see who else supports that
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[manton] Yeah. Some things may be intermingled forever. I’m not sure we can easily move away from WebFinger now that it’s established, for example.
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[tantek] we can do our best to minimize its impact and necessity, and then go from there
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[manton] Related reply from Ben Ubois, creator of Feedbin: https://ruby.social/@benubois/111267597245152198
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[manton] I think it’s a good point about verbosity. This is something the IndieWeb specs have always done a good job of, because they are based more in real-world usage.
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[KevinMarks] The Activity Streams spec did grow as an "anything you might see" universal representation, but the LD cruft does add to that.
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[manton] Yeah. I think there’s some redundancy too in some fields being included at the root level of a JSON request and also in the “object”. Not sure if that was intentional or an accident of history.
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aaronpk it came from the idea of the "activity" being different from the "object" of the activity
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aaronpk e.g. "I posted a note" has two things, the action of posting, and the note itself. the action has a date of when I did the action, and the note also has a date of when it was created. in practice these are almost always identical, but they are technically two different properties. that's not exactly the AP problem but it's similar things
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[KevinMarks] and there's a certain amount of denormalisation implied ie if the Activity is 'manton liked aaron's post' then including the post makes sense in a stream view, so you don't have to do another lookup, but for AP it is a bit odd as you're sending it to aaron's server
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[tantek] ActivityPub << Criticism: https://ruby.social/@benubois/111267597245152198
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Loqi ok, I added "Criticism: https://ruby.social/@benubois/111267597245152198" to the "See Also" section of /ActivityPub https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=89914&oldid=89214
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[tantek] [snarfed] does Bridgy Fed federate reacji to Misskey posts? e.g. like a ❤ ⭐ or special star(?) to this post? https://void.rehab/notes/9kyvsl1ktsfz2red
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[tantek] wasn't clear from https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/375 or https://fed.brid.gy/docs#apps
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[snarfed] [tantek] probably not
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Loqi [preview] [snarfed] #375 support Misskey
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[snarfed] ah yeah thanks for the nudge, that app compatibility section may be doing more harm than good
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[snarfed] by "support X app" in the docs and issues, I've generally meant _anything_, not everything
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[tantek] I'm not even sure there's a "standard" way to federate reacji via ActivityPub
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[tantek] is continue to poke at the edges of federation use-cases
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[tantek] continuing*
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[snarfed] afaik not in AS2, it's probably some custom thing or (if we're lucky) FEP
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[tantek] oof
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[snarfed] maybe https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/484 ? `type: EmojiReact`
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Loqi [preview] [snarfed] #484 support non-standard EmojiReact activity type?
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[catgirlinspace] [snarfed] akkoma implements reactions as well and it works with misskey. and there's a mastodon fork (glitch-soc maybe?) that does reactions.
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[catgirlinspace] oh nvm, it's the glitch-soc fork that wetdry.world uses https://github.com/TheEssem/mastodon
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Loqi [preview] [TheEssem] mastodon: Source code for Chuckya, a glitch-soc fork used on wetdry.world
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[manton] That EmojiReact type is interesting. Do we really need another type, though? I’ve always thought these could just be sent as replies and apps could choose to collapse all the emoji-only replies together or not.
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[manton] That way it works in all apps.
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aaronpk that's not JSON-y enough 😭
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aaronpk but to be fair, it is not trivial to determine whether am arbitrary string is a single emoji
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sknebel But then you get people replying to the emoji reactions
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aaronpk presumably you still can reply to an EmojiReact activity as far as the protocol is concerned
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sknebel But there is no UI that'll do it
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sknebel Whereas if they look like normal replies in some , it'll happen
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[manton] That’s a good point. It still doesn’t seem ideal to always be inventing new activity types.
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[manton] Another example, BookWyrm has a few extra types for reviewing books: https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/activitypub.html
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[snarfed] I was about to say AP tries to avoid implied semantics like that, ie "upgrading" single-emoji replies to reactions, but then I remembered the finicky HTML tag triggering for rel-me verification...and for mentions...and for quote posts... 😭
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[snarfed] (eg https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/461#issuecomment-1632984323 )
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Loqi [preview] [trwnh] the `RE: <url>` is the part that gets replaced by `tag[0]`. basically `name` is the microsyntax. if you wanted to have explicit affordance for "quote tweet" style semantics, you can use `rel`. for example, foundkey does this: https://akkoma.dev/Fo...
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[tantek] I think "single" character emoji replies SHOULD be received as /reacji and it's likely worth creating a new explicit AP reacji response
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[snarfed] I think the EmojiReact activity type above _is_ the explicit AP response. it's an extension vocab, but still
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aaronpk speaking of which, i probably need to update my emoji-detector library
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[KevinMarks] https://hsivonen.fi/string-length/
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[KevinMarks] Single 'extended grapheme cluster' is what you mean Tantek, and yes, that varies with unicode version
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[snarfed] similarly https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/
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[snarfed] [manton] have you ever tried posting to a Friendica group from http://micro.blog, eg https://venera.social/profile/activitypubblueskybridge/conversations ? you follow it, then mention it in a post, and it reposts that post
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[snarfed] haven't gotten that to work from BF yet, https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/493#issuecomment-1773371429
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[manton] [snarfed] Nope, I haven’t looked at Friendica much at all yet.
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