#social 2017-06-01
2017-06-01 UTC
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@kennyma ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ cc @lobster1234 (twitter.com/_/status/870063852041494528)
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saranix There was much talk about use-case. I have to wonder, is github/gitlab even the right use-case? We are talking about just the issues tab, yes? Discussion of issues? Seems like github being used in this way is already quite a kludge. Is there anything special accomplished by treating these posts as "issues"?
# saranix Since discourse was seriously considered as an alternative, and someone mentioned that mailinglist is bad alternative due to lack of "labels" (tags) and searchability. What is it exactly we are trying to accomplish? I'm thinking in terms of what it would take to write a custom solution for the job...
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jaywink astronouth7303: "so i don't think interoperability is real high on the list" <-- gitlab can be self hosted. Interoperability can also be a target between nodes of the same software stack. I'm sure that would be valuable to gitlab to be able to create a networtk of gitlabs. Just like nextcloud is enabling to be done in their sphere
# saranix I was referring to the whole conversation we all had earlier
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@fostercharles Micropub is now a W3C Recommendation. Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook and Twitter? http://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ (twitter.com/_/status/870228861967007744)
# astronouth7303 jaywink: yes, just like diaspora. It's not really interoperable if no competing software implements the protocols.
# saranix Zing! lol
# saranix to be fair, friendica and hubzilla both implement diaspora. It's diaspora that doesn't implement the other more featureful zot and dfrn
# astronouth7303 As2 doesn't cover software development, so additional vocabulary it's required
# astronouth7303 Which might be generic, or might be tied to git or gitlab's ideas
# astronouth7303 I mean, yeah, ideally
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cwebber2 omg congrats rhiaro and csarven (and timbl and some others apparently!) https://rhiaro.co.uk/2017/06/finally
# astronouth7303 nice!
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# astronouth7303 ... ldn sounds like it overlaps significantly with several social specs?
# astronouth7303 o
# astronouth7303 well, that's good
# astronouth7303 reading between the lines, activitypub push is a subset of ldn?
# astronouth7303 the note is appreciated, but it doesn't give concrete insight for implementers on how the two specs relate?
# astronouth7303 or it feels more vague than i'd like it to be
# astronouth7303 needs to read through everything again..
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# cwebber2 I think this is a pretty serious attack against friendica if I'm understanding this thread right but maybe I'm not understanding... https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1#issuecomment-305586330
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Loqi [cwebber] @jaywink I may be misunderstanding! But let's say that https://pirati.ca/display/735a2029205920ea17dbae8771484681 was the original post, right? Now let's say we have the friendica-compatible https://newbie.example/. Now, that server hasn't federat...
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# astronouth7303 i agree with you on that reading
# astronouth7303 friendica just uses a UUID-like system and prays?
# astronouth7303 indeed
# astronouth7303 URLs kinda break that, though?
# astronouth7303 depending on how you define human-meaningful and the amount of stuff needing identifiers
# astronouth7303 "There is still only one, unique and specific entity to which a name resolves." URLs do that
# astronouth7303 if that's true, *twitch twitch*
# astronouth7303 YOU GUYS KNOW THAT BAD ACTORS EXIST, RIGHT????
# astronouth7303 s/ActivityPub/Friendica2/
# Loqi [annando] No, not really. The content under https://pirati.ca/display/735a2029205920ea17dbae8771484681 you will find under https://squeet.me/display/735a2029205920ea17dbae8771484681, https://friendica.mrpetovan.com/display/735a2029205920ea17dbae8771484681 and ...
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# astronouth7303 the problem being that URL-based identifiers need servers to resolve them, and nobody wants to have a warm shutdown like that
# astronouth7303 urn:guid:....?
# astronouth7303 well, you still need to resolve them with someone
# astronouth7303 can't have just a URI, need an actual URL
# astronouth7303 i figured the solution would be that the user would go to a new service, "import" their data, and leave an "is-also" pointer at the old ID
# astronouth7303 but that doesn't help the long-term, does it?
# astronouth7303 i think under a non-redundant, URL-based system, service death is just going to have to be something we live with
# astronouth7303 you were the first to say it's not specific to HTTP :P
# astronouth7303 CAS has too many meanings for you to pull it out of nowhere
# astronouth7303 ah
# astronouth7303 problem is that you'd need an actual distributed store to resolve it
# astronouth7303 also, i don't even want to know how many bits you'd need to guarantee no collisions ever
# nightpool I dunno, IPFS does pretty well
# astronouth7303 if i were to implement that, i would be looking at BitTorrent
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# astronouth7303 and possibly some of the anonymized internet stuff
# nightpool they're a really good example of a modern content addressed storage system
# nightpool I think ipfs would make a really good "static server" backend for asset storage
# astronouth7303 but i suspect that's hard to implement, and i'm not sure how "production-ready" any of them are
# nightpool the problem we ran into considering it for mastodon was that people got kinda squicked out by the immutability of content addressed storage systems
# astronouth7303 craaaaaaaaaap
# astronouth7303 that's a thing
# astronouth7303 so i think we're back to "services may die; deal with it"
# nightpool I think that it's not really a huge failure case because things are distributed without metadata
# astronouth7303 which means providers have to maintain their cache forever
# nightpool cwebber2: "if I toot this image, and then delete my toot, will people still be able to see my image"
# nightpool is an answer which has an unambigous "yes" in any content-addressed system
# nightpool or at least, it *definitely* does in ipfs
# nightpool yeah
# nightpool but that's a tractable social problem
# astronouth7303 not familiar
# nightpool can you elaborate?
# nightpool yeah
# nightpool social networks are weird, man
# nightpool I think that user-level archiving is a huge feature that very few social platforms have taken on yet
# nightpool One of the most popular XKit addons for tumblr is PostArchive, which saves local copies of posts you want to come back to.
# nightpool I think there's a sense in which a huge part of giving end users control over their own data means giving them ways to export (and view!) data that they see
# nightpool stuff like ctrl-s works sometimes, but it's often super brittle.
# nightpool stuff like archive.org is public, which means that you can be seen as a bad actor if you put stuff there
# nightpool yeah, that's a huge thing.
# astronouth7303 and there's a number of trans folk who would rather _not_ be found by their deadname
# nightpool with my own repositories, I can use git filter-author, but I'm not going to ask other projects to do that
# astronouth7303 going back through other people's content and editing the name?
# nightpool going back through my own content and editing the name?
# astronouth7303 i mean, is the suggestion that all content refering to you should be edited in the event of a name change?
# nightpool I don't know.
# astronouth7303 that sounds like a markup thing
# nightpool yeah
# cwebber2 "Committer: https://foo-user.example/me"
# astronouth7303 cwebber2: are you talking git or social web?
# nightpool you're also just pushing it off by assuming people want to change names but not identifiers
# astronouth7303 ah, ok
# nightpool Yeah, anyway, the IPFS stuff I was looking at as strictly a block-storage thing, like a S3 replacement.
# nightpool Sure, I'm just saying. Real life people are messy.
# nightpool If there's one thing I've learned from being on tumblr for as long as I have, it's that any user-customizable identifier will get used as a name/identity. and people change identities all the time
# nightpool Trying to track down old tumblr posts, *even when they're still accessible* is a headache and a half.
# astronouth7303 hahahahaha yup
# astronouth7303 about the only thing you can do is use opaque URLs
# nightpool well, the other thing is that people often don't want the things they say they want.
# nightpool Like, I want to make a clean break on my old identity, in a meaningful way, so super transparent breadcrumbs would make me want to do something to break them. But at the same time, I don't want to ruin my previous history forever--i'll want to come back to it at some point
# nightpool so there are lots of shades of grey about what kind of behaviors people want out of a system
# astronouth7303 that's pretty easy, though? Just make a new account with no affiliations and don't delete the old one?
# nightpool but then what would I do with my social graph? :P
# astronouth7303 pray everyone friends you?
# astronouth7303 i think encouraging the principle of least surprise is a good thing in this case
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ben_thatmustbeme i think posting on an old account if you want everyone to friend a new account, or direct messaging at least a good portion of your graph to inform of the new account has worked for most people in practice
# nightpool we go back to writing letters?
# ben_thatmustbeme or potatoes
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