#social 2017-04-20

2017-04-20 UTC
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tantek Loqi, esquire
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ajordan lol cwebber I got an email about GitLab's issue for federation and thought "oh I should suggest ActivityPub!"
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ajordan only to find out that that was *exactly* what it was about :P
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cwebber :)
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cwebber https://social.tchncs.de/users/mray/updates/54900 OMG AMAZING
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Loqi [mray] @cwebber the unclean svg version of the ActivityPub tutorial illustrations look like this now https://social.tchncs.de/media/n557A7AnbMxaPDSU64A... https://social.tchncs.de/system/media_attachments/files/000/066/135/original/ecc0910e6a9ec2b5.png?1492649114
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tantek what's their issue?
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tantek ajordan is there a URL for the issue discussion? or is this just a general "issue"?
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tantek Interesting dialog on Mastodon about monoculture and the risks of putting all your federation eggs in the Mastodon (OStatus?) basket: https://socially.constructed.space/users/KitRedgrave/updates/9660
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Loqi [Kit Redgrave ✅ (self-signed)] https://indieweb.org/monoculture hi mastodon
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aaronpk i assume it's the gitlab issue linked from the indieweb wiki https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013
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aaronpk interesting discussion thread
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aaronpk goes to update our monoculture page
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aaronpk re: https://social.nasqueron.org/users/deadsuperhero/updates/3276
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Loqi [Sean Tilley] @KitRedgrave Good read, but it kind of ends on the note of "only our stuff will solve the problem", which illustrates the very pattern they are describing....
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aaronpk and https://socially.constructed.space/@KitRedgrave/383647
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Loqi [Kit Redgrave ✅ (self-signed)] @deadsuperhero only our stuff which is making your own stuff ;)
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aaronpk added "Encourage multiple independent implementations of any specification" to the "antidotes" section
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tantek_ good call
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cwebber though mastodon and gnu social andbActive
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cwebber oops
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cwebber postActiv *are* federating over OStatus
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cwebber though
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cwebber they are hitting issues
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cwebber they're being corrected as they go, but there's definitely been some skew as in terms of how things work
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ajordan aaronpk: yeah that was the one I was talking about
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ajordan probably ActivityPub will help a lot with the monoculture problem
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ajordan IMO
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ajordan I certainly am interested in pump.io becoming less of a monoculture but it's also worth noting that at a certain point interop comes with real maintenance costs
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ajordan e.g. a couple weeks ago I accepted a patch adding mf2 classes to all posts in the web UI (yay!) but I wouldn't take patches for e.g. Webmention. because it adds complexity
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Loqi :D
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ajordan lol wtf Loqi <3
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aaronpk adds complexity? what's the concern?
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tantek ajordan, for sending or receiving webmentions or both?
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ajordan both probably
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ajordan aaronpk: just more code generally
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ajordan to be clear I would support e.g. some sort of bridge, I just don't think it belongs in core
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aaronpk Once you have mf2 markup, sending webmentions is pretty easy
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aaronpk There's definitely more involved with receiving, but not so much more than any sort of handling of any external untrusted content
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ajordan yeah, I hear you
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ajordan it's just more stuff though
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ajordan (to be clear part of this is me being super conservative in order to try to respect Evan's vision for the design)
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aaronpk The nice thing about webmention is you can totally implement just sending or just receiving and still get value out of it
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ajordan yeah
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ajordan I don't mean to pick on Webmention in particular obviously
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ajordan just saying like... you can't support every protocol under the sun
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ajordan which is why I think this WG is so neat
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tantek ajordan indeed, there were so many proposals when we started this WG
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tantek Webmention is perhaps currently the most popular of all the federation protocols, in terms of most broadly (# of) implemented
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tantek and this WG only has about half dozen specs / protocols total anyway, so that's far from "every protocol under the sun"
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tantek s/implemented/implementations
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tantek As aaronpk put it, you get incremental benefit from sending and/or receiving (by design) which has allowed implementations to do so incrementally as they have time to do so
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ajordan tantek: sure, that's true
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ajordan Webmention is perhaps a bad example
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ajordan I however would feel uncomfortable introducing new protocols without consulting Evan
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ajordan (besides AP obviously)
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ajordan shrugs
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tantek ajordan understandable!
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tantek for Webmention in particular, since that was developed in this working group (and both Evan and I are co-chairs, so I would hope that indicates some degree of approval / support for all our efforts here), consider...
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tantek start with just implementing Webmention sending for links and mentions in posts. that part is very straightforward and there are libraries that implement the key bits in various languages
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tantek that way you can start to see how it works, and make sure it is a good fit
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tantek happy to help with any questions with how to do that (I've implemented webmention sending myself, including publishing an open source PHP library to help with webmention endpoint discovery)
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tantek heh: https://twitter.com/csswg/status/851600252444475396 cc: sandro
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Loqi [@csswg] The CSSWG now has its own Mastodon instance at https://social.csswg.org
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tantek odd thing I just noticed about Mastodon instances, different from early twitter: no obvious public timeline on instance homepage! nor on about or linked therefrom!
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tantek e.g. https://social.csswg.org/about/more says "48 statuses" which could easily link to the public timeline
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tantek assuming there is one?
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@agektmr ActivityPub https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ (twitter.com/_/status/854967268534403072)
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dmitriz cwebber - that’s a great tutorial!
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cwebber thanks dmitriz :)
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ajordan !tell tantek yeah, I was thinking about this last night and I've changed my mind to be tentatively in favor of at least sending Webmentions, subject to Evan's approval. it's just so simple
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Loqi Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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ajordan !tell tantek not sure about receiving since then we get into hairy questions about how to present that to both API clients and users, but
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Loqi Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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KevinMarks Mastodon, unlike gnusocial, doesn't have a public timeline webpage. But it does have a public api
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KevinMarks So I made a viewer that turns it into h-feed
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KevinMarks It's at unmung.com/mastoview
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KevinMarks So you can see http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=social.csswg.org&view=local
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KevinMarks Or the federated view
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KevinMarks http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=social.csswg.org&view=federated
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