#social 2018-03-22
2018-03-22 UTC
# 
melody dudes' attention
# melody the kind of privacy that most tech people are concerned about is actually really centered around white men's concerns though -- like the whole rhetoric around online privacy is itself wrapped up in a lot of privilege, like its really wrapped up in concerns around advertising and wide-net surveillance / data warehousing -- most other people have much more dire and immediate concerns that aren't addressed by the kind of privacy paranoia that catches white tech
# fr33domlover saranix, I don't think I'm very good at convincing or inspiring people, so don't take my answer as advice, but it'd probably say something like and "it's in a bad state exactly because of this kind of thinking" and "just because other people do bad stuff doesn't mean it's ok for us to do it too"
# fr33domlover Tbh my job has nothing inherent to do with technology
# fr33domlover So I can choose the people and communities I interact with
# fr33domlover I once had a coworker long time ago who was quitting and moving to a company that makes money from the data it collects on its users
# fr33domlover Unlike most other people around me at the time, he did care about that
# fr33domlover He said, I know it's evil
# fr33domlover But... he still took the job
# fr33domlover I feel like money plays a primary role here
# melody im really sick of most privacy advocates for that reason, there's just no real acknowledgement or interest in tackling the harder social problems that are actually a concern for people who are used to being surveilled in a more uh, real , direct and impacting way -- and instead focus on protecting themselves (and really nobody else) from what little bit they are subjected to
# melody it's a myopic kind of point of focus
# fr33domlover The biggest problem is definitely social
# fr33domlover But it also must be scary for many people to talk about the social problem
# saranix interesting assumptions folks :-) Actually he was a black male and most of the rest of the room was black (I am not)
# fr33domlover Because it touches the foundations of society
# fr33domlover I've met many people who have some dream to be rich and ideas about start ups or business idea etc. and their opinions seem to favor freedom to do-what-it-takes-to-make-money not because they strnongly believe these things in their heart
# fr33domlover But simply because it aligns with their dream
# fr33domlover e.g. if you say something like "all software should be free (as in freedom)" you threaten the huge proprietary software corporations and everyone else making millions in this way
# fr33domlover So it's a big statement to say and it takes some courage to say it
# fr33domlover it's like scientists are scared of doing big innovative things that make the current stuff obsolete
# fr33domlover Because they're scared of being "burned" in the scientific community
# fr33domlover If we replace, say, faceb00k entirely with mastodon and similar networks
# fr33domlover Then there is no "huge multi billion company that provides an online social network"
# fr33domlover You remove from the system the ability to have such a thing
# melody saranix: i was more reacting to tantek's implication that privacy advocacy was somehow immune from being driven by white male privilege -- not really anything about the person at your meeting
# saranix The strangest thing was trying to explain to one of the main people, who was telling me their whole mission is to get people to shop local and stuff, that the exact people they are trying to attract are the most likely to be privacy concious, and would be averse to their shopper-tracking-apparatus. Like I was trying to tell her how to be more effective, but I had a hard time getting it across.
# saranix I was like, "you are trying to attract me! and I'm telling you that would make me turn the other way!" (in my head, I refrained from saying that)
# fr33domlover That reminds me of an offer I once got :P
# fr33domlover To participate in a project that tracks every single item people buy and bring home
# fr33domlover In my mind I was like O_O are you crazy lol
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# fr33domlover saranix, this time I have an actual relevant activitypub question ^_^
# fr33domlover When I GET an outbox, I get all the public stuff posted by the actor
# fr33domlover is there some optional or suggested or standard way to filter that content?
# fr33domlover Like, say, I want to see just the Likes that an actor made
# fr33domlover Should I GET a separate "likes" collection
# fr33domlover or get the outbox and somehow ask to filter just the likes?
# fr33domlover But it can also get more complicated, "likes" is a single specific collection
# fr33domlover What if an actor has hypothetical collections "c1", "c2", "c3"... etc.
# fr33domlover Should those be separate actors? Should an actor's JSON profile mention all of them? if not, should there be any standard way to discover them?
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# fr33domlover For example if I have events like "Joe opened issue #1" and "Joe commented on issue #1" I want to be able to GET just the stuff about issue #1
# fr33domlover Ugh I wish this place had a mailing list :p
# saranix there is no standard. The way I see it, it's a question of where you qwant to split your client/server activity. You could do collection?type=likes, or you could do collection#type=likes
# 
tantek and I completely agree with your statement: https://chat.indieweb.org/social/2018-03-22/1521676825340600
# saranix the place to put collections on the actor object is the "streams" property https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#streams-property
# melody sorry for putting words in your mouth, i have a knee-jerk around this and interpreted poorly
# saranix I'm not a big fan of the "likes" collection (for similar reason as the followers collection)...
# melody years of grating arguments with myopic nerds have worn down my patience :(
# fr33domlover saranix, what do you mean split client/server activity? hmmm "streams" wouldn't work here because there could easily be hundreds or thousands of them, can't rely on listing them all - well, technically can, just feels a bit too much :p
# fr33domlover I suppose I'm wondering about compatibility with the fediverse
# saranix fr33domlover, lol you could always do streams: [
{ url: https://example/collections", summary: "list of collections" } ]# fr33domlover saranix, haha yeah
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# fr33domlover saranix, for my own web app I don't care much which approach it is, I just want to interoperate with the fediverse and come up with the best option
# fr33domlover outbox?type=coll / outbox#coll / coll
# saranix most likely the most compatible way would be to be very liberal with what objects are actors themselves, that way people can connect using really really dumb software.
# fr33domlover saranix, I feel like making stuff actors is also the most flexible approach
# fr33domlover For example,
# fr33domlover If I make something as small as a "ticket dependency" an actor,
# fr33domlover (1) I lose nothing
# fr33domlover (2) I can trivially support comments on that dependency and delivery of notifications
# fr33domlover I lose nothing because I can make the inbox URL identical to the actor ID
# fr33domlover (since the ticket dependency is not a person running a web browser, it will never need to GET its inbox)
# fr33domlover I'm just examining the other extreme: Only people are actors
# fr33domlover And everything else: Projects, tickets, ticket dependencies, whatever, is not actors
# fr33domlover ActivityPub doesn't seem to cover arbitrary filtering of content
# fr33domlover Like "I want to be notified only about tickets related to topic X and which have severity Y"
# fr33domlover But I guess this sort of thing would be meaningful in both approaches
# fr33domlover Even if every single ticket is an actor, there's no obvious standard way to do sorting and filtering of tickets in your web browser tab
# fr33domlover The server-to-server part of that may be challenging, but, it's doesn't seem that useful anyway
# fr33domlover I'm for making-everything-an-actor ^_^
# saranix I think the reason that filtering isn't clear, is because activitystrreams is really about notifying about activities on objects. It's just that, in the microblogging world, the activity IS the object
# saranix sort of
# saranix I mean, the stuff going server->server doesn't necessarily have to provide anything other than a url, maybe a summary or name, stuff like that, but the actual data might still need to be fetched to be looked at (like an image e.g.)
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# fr33domlover saranix, I think it's even more than that - not only filtering-at-delivery time not very useful in many cases in general, it's even less useful in this context of microblogging or generally social stuff
# fr33domlover You don't want to do "Show me all the bananas Joe ate during the last month"
# fr33domlover Well you can
# fr33domlover But, people usually just want to look at the feed
# fr33domlover And even then, that banana thing is done client-to-server
# fr33domlover Not federated, so, ActivityPub doesn't have to worry about it much
# fr33domlover Filtering feels like something for data scientists
# fr33domlover Regular users don't filter by bananas, they just scroll through the feed
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# fr33domlover I'm finding that I have a lot of questions about my federation implementation
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# fr33domlover I wish I had some place to ask them where they're recorded and people can see and reply asynchronously
# fr33domlover (Like of this place had a mailing list)
# JanKusanagi well, the topic says "Chat logs: https://....." :D
# fr33domlover JanKusanagi, yeah but it's still diffcult to manage a deep long discussion about some technical topic using IRC alone
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