#social 2018-01-03

2018-01-03 UTC
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eprodrom ummm
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eprodrom cwebber, are we doing socialcg call tomorrow?
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eprodrom_ cwebber meeting tomorrow?
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cwebber2 hello everyone
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cwebber2 eprodrom_: yes, meeting today
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cwebber2 I'll put up the wiki page and etc
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cwebber2 in half an hour
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cwebber2 aaronpk: ping / reminder :)
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aaronpk cwebber2: I cant make it today! Also we gotta get the pages up ahead of time otherwise it makes it look like there isn’t a meeting and I will I not be planning on the time
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cwebber2 aaronpk: yes, I'm not very good at doing that... maybe you'd like to help on that front? :)
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puckipedia oh hey there we go
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cwebber2 also we're still being "confused" on time because of daylight savings... aaronpk, ok with moving it officially to 16:00 UTC so it doesn't end up being 7AM your time? ;)
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cwebber2 that's the time people keep expecting anyway
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aaronpk Oh yeah that would be nice
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cwebber2 aaronpk: maybe we should also move the meetings back to weekly again
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cwebber2 easier to remember
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cwebber2 and the SocialWG wound down so
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cwebber2 less duplicate work
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aaronpk Mayyybe
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cwebber2 er1n: Gargron: maybe want to talk about AP/AS2 groups on this call?
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puckipedia quickly grabs some food
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cwebber2 just did that :)
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cwebber2 eprodrom_: meeting is now if you want to join :)
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puckipedia okay I'm here
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cwebber2 oh hey its beatrix-bitrot :)
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beatrix-bitrot waves
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: puckipedia and I just got off the call because we thought nobody else was showing up but maybe you'd like to talk about groups?
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cwebber2 I think we have a pretty short summary of things tho
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beatrix-bitrot ok well maybe hit me with the summary first i guess?
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cwebber2 Group should just be an actor with an inbox (publish to group) and an outbox (read the archives!)
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beatrix-bitrot i would like to talk about it since this seems to be the right time and place
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cwebber2 you could even use the Follow mechanism to do group management.
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beatrix-bitrot right
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puckipedia and to address a post you'd do something like {"to": ["https://example.com/group", "https://example.com/group/followers"]}
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cwebber2 {"type": "Group",
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cwebber2 "inbox": "https://...foo.../inbox", <- send messages to group
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cwebber2 "outbox": "https://...foo.../outbox" <- read archives
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cwebber2 "followers": "https://...foo.../outbox"} <- current subscribers
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cwebber2 puckipedia: maybe you don't even need to include the followers to address, I dunno
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cwebber2 since that's the actor's "behavior"
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puckipedia cwebber2: I feel like you should, to make it clear
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beatrix-bitrot that's what i was just about to ask
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beatrix-bitrot why that?
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puckipedia cwebber2: also, sharedInbox
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cwebber2 hm, sharedInbox is such a PITA ;)
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cwebber2 but yeah
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cwebber2 puckipedia: thinking from an actor as in actor model perspective
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cwebber2 I'd think of this as being a relay type actor
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puckipedia bad idea: {"type": ["Group", "OrderedCollection"], "id": "example", "followers": "example"}
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puckipedia wait this gets dangerously close to giving collections an inbox :D:
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cwebber2 honestly I think a group should forward to all its actors' inboxes individually and should skip the sharedInbox mechanism
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puckipedia mmh?
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cwebber2 *especially* because you don't know who's in the group necessarily
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puckipedia cwebber2: you do know if you use the follow mechanism, tbh
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cwebber2 this is how mailing lists already work over smtp
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puckipedia I mean
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puckipedia hm
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puckipedia HM
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puckipedia I thought it'd be like origin -> group server -> sharedInboxes
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beatrix-bitrot i was imagining the follow mechanism would be used for this yeah...
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beatrix-bitrot and also like puck says just now
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puckipedia wait, I think we are hitting the post forwarding mechanism now :D
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beatrix-bitrot yes
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beatrix-bitrot this is what i wanted to talk about
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puckipedia https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#inbox-forwarding this
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beatrix-bitrot oh
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puckipedia The values of to, cc, and/or audience contain a Collection owned by the server.
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beatrix-bitrot ?
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cwebber2 puckipedia: in a sense that's what I'd like to *not* trigger here
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puckipedia mmh
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cwebber2 the forwarding mechanism can result in duplicates
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cwebber2 and you really don't want to do that for groups
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cwebber2 just let the group send it out
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cwebber2 the group knows where it's supposed to go
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puckipedia cwebber2: wait. are you thinking of the same thing
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cwebber2 no need to involve the group's followers at all
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puckipedia cwebber2: I mean, if you have to: example, example/followers
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puckipedia you deliver to example, and you can't deliver to /followers because you don't own it
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puckipedia then example delivers it to all followers, using sharedInbox
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cwebber2 puckipedia: right, in which case, if we switch to group group/followers
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cwebber2 we would do it twice right?
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cwebber2 the group would forward it, then the followers would forward it, and it could be a big mess
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puckipedia oh, you expect that group is sending it out
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puckipedia I would suggest Not Doing That(TM) :P
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cwebber2 yes
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puckipedia but yeah
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cwebber2 I think it should be like SMTP mailing lists
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puckipedia hm
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puckipedia what if we drop the outbox on the Group
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cwebber2 the FOSS world already runs on those and has been doing fine :)
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cwebber2 outbox should be optional
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puckipedia and have it just have an inbox. which is the incoming messages
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cwebber2 in case you want to allow reading archives
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puckipedia which /also/ is the outgoing messages, because relay
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cwebber2 it could also be subscriber only access to the outbox
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puckipedia beatrix-bitrot: right, we're now really looking at the nitpicky details, sorry about that
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cwebber2 puckipedia: ah I see what you're saying
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cwebber2 puckipedia: though
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beatrix-bitrot i can't talk much about the details but i want to absorb what i can
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cwebber2 puckipedia: I kind of hate readable inbox tbh, *nothing* currently reads from your inbox
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cwebber2 right?
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cwebber2 it's so dangerous to let someone read from your inbox
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cwebber2 I think all applications, in practice, show an empty collection
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puckipedia https://puckipedia.com/inbox
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cwebber2 readable outbox is something people currently do
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cwebber2 ha
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cwebber2 ok
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cwebber2 I'm wrong :)
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puckipedia tbh, inbox/outbox are just plain collections
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cwebber2 puckipedia: so here's a question
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puckipedia and only show public posts, so I consider it Fine(TM)
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cwebber2 should the group forward the message as-is
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cwebber2 or wrap it in an Announce
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cwebber2 that also may affect whether we choose inbox or outbox
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puckipedia would it be logical to announce another announce?
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cwebber2 sure
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cwebber2 why not
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cwebber2 recursion is great
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cwebber2 puckipedia: but announces are unlikely to show up in groups anyway
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puckipedia tbh I would suggest not Announcing a non-activity
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cwebber2 hm
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puckipedia cwebber2: {type: Announce, to: group..., object: otherPost}
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cwebber2 yeah maybe they should just forward the messages as-is
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cwebber2 though, let's think SMTP mailing lists again
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cwebber2 when someone sends a message to the SMTP mailing list
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cwebber2 Mailman or whatever *does* append headers to it
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cwebber2 indicating it came from the group
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cwebber2 so in a sense that's closer to wrapping in an Announce
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puckipedia *but* the message is sent as-is
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cwebber2 it isn't usually
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cwebber2 well
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cwebber2 the body is
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puckipedia also smtp doesn't have retoots
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cwebber2 lol
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cwebber2 also wait
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cwebber2 the body sometimes isn't either!
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cwebber2 some mailing lists append a footer
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cwebber2 for subscribe/etc
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cwebber2 I'm not saying it's a good idea
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cwebber2 I'm just trying to explore what's done in existing spaces
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puckipedia GNU Social groups require you to effectively tag a post
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cwebber2 also, we should think carefully:
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cwebber2 is an announce maybe required in practice *anyway*, because of http signatures?
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puckipedia cwebber2: we'd resign the object with http sigs, but the json-ld signature would stay
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cwebber2 puckipedia: right, but is there anything wonky if I'm forwarding a mechanism with the actor at puckipedia.com but my server is dustycloud.org and I have an http signature from dustycloud.org
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cwebber2 I guess you specify what actor it's coming from in the http sig itself
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beatrix-bitrot the json-ld one is the one that verifies it really came from the alleged author?
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: yes
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puckipedia iirc Mastodon resigns objects when doing the mention forwarding
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puckipedia ehm, resigns the requesT*(
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puckipedia honestly I haven't looked too closely at it
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melody hrm
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puckipedia I just kinda discard the entire contents of the object
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puckipedia as I don't have JSON-LD validation yet
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beatrix-bitrot ehmmmm how does it differ from boosting?
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puckipedia beatrix-bitrot: mention forwarding?
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beatrix-bitrot or how groups ought to work
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: boosting uses the Announce wrapper
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cwebber2 so that's part of what we're discussing
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cwebber2 whether or not it should use that
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puckipedia {type: Create, object: {type: Note, content: hi}}
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puckipedia vs
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cwebber2 however, the forwarding mechanism doesn't wrap it
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puckipedia {type: Announce, object: that_note_there}
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cwebber2 puckipedia: I think you've convinced me
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puckipedia mention forwarding is a different thing. if you mention someone and it reaches their server, it will send it out to all followers, with json-ld
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cwebber2 we shouldn't wrap in Announce
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puckipedia cwebber2: :D
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cwebber2 for another reason too:
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cwebber2 it may look confusing for UIs
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puckipedia yes most definitely
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cwebber2 it may show up looking like a share
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cwebber2 when it isn't
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puckipedia also what if you announce an announce from a group back into the group :D:
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cwebber2 I think I never would have suggested wrapping in Announce if Announce were called Share, as it should be D:
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cwebber2 oh well
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cwebber2 lol
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beatrix-bitrot so this stuff being discussed now
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beatrix-bitrot does it need to be written up somewhere?
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puckipedia this channel's logged, but we might write up a more formal specification, I guess?
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cwebber2 yeah
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melody how would you know if a message is forwarded from a group?
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cwebber2 we could start an etherpad
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beatrix-bitrot yes i was thinking of specifications
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puckipedia melody: do you need to know?
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cwebber2 puckipedia: I sort my smtp mail by mailing list
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cwebber2 so you might want to
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puckipedia oh that
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puckipedia I thought 'announcing a post from a group'
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cwebber2 but, I suppose you could sort by addressing
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melody UIs could have a good reason to distinguish
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beatrix-bitrot UIs definitely have reason to distinguish
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puckipedia yeah, I misunderstood again
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melody if I follow a lot of people I might not recall offhand if I'm following somebody or if a post I've seen is in my inbox because it came from a group
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melody i want to know the immediate source of any message i'm seeing usually
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cwebber2 melody: and indeed that's one reason that Mailman etc relay add headers
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cwebber2 I think we used to have Announce and Share separately in AS2 for exactly this use case D:
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beatrix-bitrot is there no way to include the information that it was relayed other than wrapping it up?
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cwebber2 we could have a new activity for forwarding
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: well it either needs to wrap it (message integrity, after all you can't tamper with something signed) or it could be in the headers of the HTTP POST to the inbox
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cwebber2 but, in that case your server might know
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cwebber2 but you, reading from a client, might not
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cwebber2 that info wouldn't show up in the inbox without wrapping the messages again
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beatrix-bitrot your server will have to tell you somehow anyway no?
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cwebber2 yes, but consider that an inbox is possibly one json object with a bunch of other json objects embedded
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cwebber2 you'd need to wrap there right?
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cwebber2 if your server were to tell you
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cwebber2 and it wasn't going to tamper with the messages
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cwebber2 wrapping seems the only way
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melody i don't think it makes sense for the server to be acting on invisible info not wrapping the objects
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beatrix-bitrot but you do not want to wrap, correct?
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: we definitely don't want to wrap in Announce (ie "share")
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cwebber2 but we could possibly have a new type
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cwebber2 that's just Forward or etc
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cwebber2 or ServerForward
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cwebber2 or something
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cwebber2 maybe not a good idea to get the word Server in there
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beatrix-bitrot right
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cwebber2 but
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cwebber2 it also means that all AP servers and clients need to understand that new wrapping object
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cwebber2 and its type
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cwebber2 and know what to do with it
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melody i think creating a new type would require some additional thought, not that I'm advocating using Announce, but I'm not sure that the semantics of Forward really serve all group use cases
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cwebber2 extra logic
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cwebber2 melody: I agree it would take additional thought
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cwebber2 so here's a question
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beatrix-bitrot i can only really take your word for it that Announce is not the right thing ^^;;
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: allow me to demonstrate :)
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cwebber2 what does Mastodon do when it gets an Announce currently?
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cwebber2 it treats it as a repost right?
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cwebber2 and it even shows it in the UI with that arrow reposty icon
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eprodrom_ cwebber, sorry I missed it. I was up with a sick kid all night.
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cwebber2 what would happen if we overloaded the meaning of Announce and used it for two different things
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cwebber2 eprodrom_: it moved to an informal IRC meeting!
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cwebber2 so you can read the backlog and participate now if you'd like
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eprodrom_ ok great
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melody i mean that's what a group is doing in this scenario isn't it? reposting something by somebody else for its own audience?
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cwebber2 we're talking about Groups
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eprodrom_ oh yeah
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beatrix-bitrot yes
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eprodrom_ announce is great there
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cwebber2 melody: yes, but now imagine you're getting a ton of messages addressed to groups
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eprodrom_ Announce++
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Loqi announce has 1 karma
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cwebber2 if I send a message to tofu-lovers
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cwebber2 every message I send there
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cwebber2 should it show up in the UI as if tofu-lovers had reposted it?
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eprodrom_ oh
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cwebber2 even if that's the first time you get it
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eprodrom_ yes!
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melody arguably, yes
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cwebber2 really?
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cwebber2 I think this would be confusing for me, thinking about Mastodon's UI
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beatrix-bitrot or it should be up to the system displaying it to decide anyway
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cwebber2 I feel like I'd want a different type
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: but the system would have to know the difference!
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cwebber2 I'm saying these are semantically two different
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cwebber2 things
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beatrix-bitrot system need only know tofu-lovers is a group right?
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eprodrom_ between a share from the group, and a share from a person?
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cwebber2 in fact I think they used to be... we used to have Announce vs Share iirc...
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eprodrom_ that seems pretty clear
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cwebber2 I mean
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cwebber2 you could look that up
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cwebber2 that the actor is a Group
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cwebber2 I feel like I'm not wild about it though I agree you could use that to visually distinguish it
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cwebber2 eprodrom_: I think we used to have Announce vs Share in AS2 for this very reason but merged them maybe?
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puckipedia what if you limit Activities to a Group to [Create, Announce]?
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Loqi http://meme.loqi.me/m/4sE9hP5L.jpg
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melody I'm not personally wild about the behavior of groups being treated as forwarding relays, I can't think of anything except mailing lists that works that way
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cwebber2 melody: well effectively that is what groups are :)
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cwebber2 mailing lists
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melody should that be what groups are though?
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eprodrom_ if you want groups to put stuff in your inbox
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beatrix-bitrot i am interested in how else they might be
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eprodrom_ melody they can be more
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eprodrom_ but this is mostly how they work on FB
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eprodrom_ possible also to tease out group from collection of members from collection of admins
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eprodrom_ so
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melody Like, I guess I'm unclear what groups in this context are supposed to be replicating maybe
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beatrix-bitrot it's a way to send stuff to some set of people that don't necessarily follow you conveniently right?
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cwebber2 sounds like a mailing list :)
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beatrix-bitrot as far as i am concerned it doesn't really need to replicate anything if it does that well
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beatrix-bitrot like a mailing list, or a chat room, or probably lots of things
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beatrix-bitrot i would like to be able to have a conversation like this using a group
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cwebber2 I agree on that point!
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cwebber2 there's no reason we need to replicate the delayed level of conversation of mailing lists ;)
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melody my concern is about things like permissions -- who can post to a group? groups should have membership semantics that don't necessarily dovetail cleanly with follow/forwarding semantics
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puckipedia I think this is mostly unspecified, I guess?
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cwebber2 melody: well, if we think of mailing lists again, our Follow mechanism actually does nicely match
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cwebber2 since we have explicit Accept/Reject
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cwebber2 so we can emulate moderated subscription
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melody i don't think we should be emulating mailing lists abuse prevention mechanisms
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melody monumental disaster
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cwebber2 melody: heh, these are two separate tricky questions, but I agree we should consider them together
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beatrix-bitrot ok, so who can post to a group? is that even a protocol level thing?
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cwebber2 though that may mean multiplying the complexity of a conversation ;)
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puckipedia beatrix-bitrot: probably not
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cwebber2 beatrix-bitrot: I don't think so, I think the group can decide... but you can probably infer based on whether you're a follower
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cwebber2 but the group may decide to not send along your message if some filter decides not to, for instance
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beatrix-bitrot maybe some groups allow posts from anyone, maybe some only from followers
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cwebber2 sure
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melody a client should have a mechanism to determine whether you can post to it or not
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melody so that would need to be defined behavior
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cwebber2 melody: well... though you might not know in advance if your *specific* post can get through
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melody otherwise you get nasty UX with messages that just never materialize because you didn't know you couldn't post them
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cwebber2 eg I may be generally subscribed to a mailing list
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cwebber2 and I can send messages generally
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cwebber2 but my message got rejected because it looked spammy
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melody you should know if you can send messages generally though, regardless of if it also gets filtered out later
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beatrix-bitrot i guess if you tried to post to a group you couldn't post to for whatever reason the server should give you a 403 or something
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cwebber2 melody: maybe an Accept on your Follow is good enough to indicate that?
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cwebber2 that's how your client accrues information that it knows you're part of the group
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Loqi yea!
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beatrix-bitrot that couples accepting messages and distributing them tho
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melody what if a group wants to allow people to follow it but only allow admins to post?
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Loqi http://meme.loqi.me/m/4sEJrPVa.jpg
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puckipedia mmh. should it be possible to e.g. use a Group as e.g. a Facebook pagPage
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melody like a broadcast list
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cwebber2 thanks Loqi :P
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beatrix-bitrot the group could possibly also follow you?
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Loqi you're welcome
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puckipedia beatrix-bitrot: yeah, thinking about that. but that means that your posts all arrive into the group's inbox
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beatrix-bitrot that would be bad
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melody i think that looks hacky, follow semantics aren't a good fit
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puckipedia maybe have a `moderators` collection on the group
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puckipedia and {type: Add, object: user, target: group/moderators}
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melody groups have membership and access control semantics that don't cleanly match a follow relationship
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puckipedia or, just {type: Accept, object: user, actor: group}
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cwebber2 for really complex things, eventually https://w3c-ccg.github.io/ld-ocap/ may be a good fit, but I would say not yet ;)
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cwebber2 (particularly for moderation things)
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cwebber2 so someone ( beatrix-bitrot ?) suggested writing this stuff up
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beatrix-bitrot i asked if it was going to be/needed to be written up
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beatrix-bitrot i'm trying to determine whether the protocol as it is specified provides enough for us to implement groups
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beatrix-bitrot or if more protocol needs to happen first
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puckipedia anyways quick tangent: https://gist.github.com/puckipedia/fcd9c7e12d9d50897b9a16179abbd58a I wrote down a semi-formal thing for my suggestion for JSON-LD sigs
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cwebber2 https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/ap-groups
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melody anyway the reason I'm being persistent about this is because access control and abuse prevention go hand in hand -- groups could very easily become spam or harassment relays if we don't treat it as more than an afterthought
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beatrix-bitrot melody that is one of my main concerns
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cwebber2 I actually think AP's notion of ACL is fairly poor... and ACLs are already a fairly poor design
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cwebber2 confused deputy / ambient authority problems, and then you add the "implied by addressing" bit from AP and it's not a great time IMO
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cwebber2 that was part of my motivator for working on https://w3c-ccg.github.io/ld-ocap/ (but there are other motivators)
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melody i'm using "access control" very generally, substitute a less loaded term
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melody at your discretion
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cwebber2 :)
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melody the point is that having open-access forwarding relays that amplify your audience and (if not designed correctly) can circumvent blocking and you have a bad time waiting to happen
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melody just wanna make sure all the angles are thought through
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cwebber2 nods
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beatrix-bitrot so should groups only forward posts from members?
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melody arguably that should be up to the group
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beatrix-bitrot right
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beatrix-bitrot so it's a software thing rather than a protocol thing
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melody but clients need to know whether you can post to a group
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beatrix-bitrot that would be good yes
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melody so that's a protocol t hing
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beatrix-bitrot is there room in however we describe the group itself to specify that?
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beatrix-bitrot whether posting is open or members only or some arbitrary set of allowed people?
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melody idk, permissions are messy
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beatrix-bitrot i don't have a very good knowledge of protocol things unfortunately, mostly just mastodon internals
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beatrix-bitrot and even there i know less than a lot of others
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melody i have more concerns than i have solutions, and haven't yet written a line of code for my eventual implementation, so you're three steps ahead of me
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@samim @fredwilson @Twitter it's early days, but check https://indieweb.org/ and all the action unfolding related to activitypub: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ a strong distributed social web would be in the interest of many ecosystem stakeholders (just not the centralised platform holders and their investors) (twitter.com/_/status/948634046678134784)
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@csarven 📢 Happy to report that https://dokie.li/ is also a client implementation of https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ Reports: https://activitypub.rocks/implementation-report/ Hot sauce: https://github.com/linkeddata/dokieli #LinkedData #RWW (twitter.com/_/status/948646494575497216)
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puckipedia ooooooh
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csarven An example: https://twitter.com/kidehen/status/946818993691742208
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Loqi [@kidehen] New @dokieli feature that reveals annotation activity of your contacts (objects of foaf:knows relations) https://gitter.im/linkeddata/dokieli?at=5a4584200163b028108b99f6. #RWW #RDFa https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DSPG1aFUMAAUtLP.jpg
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csarven (see screenshots)
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csarven The dev announcement/process: https://gitter.im/linkeddata/dokieli?at=5a4584200163b028108b99f6
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Loqi Aaronpk made 2 edits to [[Socialwg/push-name]] https://www.w3.org/wiki/index.php?diff=105459&oldid=100773
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@csarven @misuba @pfrazee Who exactly? #LinkedData Notifications https://www.w3.org/TR/ldn/ emerged out of the work on Solid servers and applications eg https://dokie.li/ . Specs that all play well together: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ (twitter.com/_/status/948680677028958208)
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