#social 2019-10-21
2019-10-21 UTC
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dansup I'm lending a hand to GS devs to finish the AP plugin I started early last year
# dansup I will update https://git.gnu.io/dansup/ActivityPub soon
xmpp-social and vitalyster joined the channel; vitalyster left the channel
# kaniini dansup: lol the plugin does not even use that
# kaniini however i am quite anxious about the GNU Social stuff for other reasons
# kaniini they want to be "OStatus first"
# dansup kaniini: thats because diogo took it over
# kaniini i feel like this is going to end with me having to write a plugin to detect and automatically limit what federation occurs with GNU Social
# dansup GS needs a dedicated core maintainer, and I tried. The lack of support from mnn-o is why I started pixelfed
# dansup I started a major refactor of GS to laravel, it could have saved the project! https://git.gnu.io/dansup/gnu-social/-/branches
# kaniini there is much work to do, i need to propose a bunch of things for the call on saturday
# kaniini the problem with GS isn't the source code, it's the mentality
# kaniini they believe all posts should be public, period
# kaniini while there are problems with the way scopes in mastodon work on an AP-level, there needs to be some kind of solution to audience narrowing
# dansup not just that, but the project will require a major refactor if they want to use the latest version of PHP.
# kaniini i think we need some sort of AP capability negotiation
# kaniini idk
# kaniini well
# kaniini really i think the solution is to make the audience field authoritative and expand it prior to sending the message
# kaniini that gives a very simple pass/fail conformance criterion
# kaniini but even so, if it's not conformant, what does that mean
# kaniini users can still be burned by a non-conformant instance
# kaniini and even with capability negotiation, an instance can simply lie
# kaniini (making the audience field authoritative would bring us back to being basically in line with what SMTP does, incidentally)
# dansup I'm more concerned about GS core, it needs a lot of work to support ActivityPub
# dansup and be scalable, with or without redis
# kaniini well i am just saying, in general, GS (and their mentality) is a symptom of a design flaw
# kaniini or, rather that we need to be concerned about such things is a symptom
# dansup it would be easier at this point to fork pixelfed and add text support than modernize GS
# kaniini why don't you do it then
# dansup I was just saying, there are a lot of options right now and while I'd like to help GS, it may be better if those devs focus on something else
# dansup my time is better spent working on pixelfed, https://socialhome.network/content/1c467abe-242f-4ef0-abba-d8bca82e8988/
# kaniini i don't think those numbers actually matter
# kaniini or are actually meaningful in any way
# kaniini i've stopped looking at them :)
# kaniini what matters is building the best technology we can
# kaniini and using that technology to present compelling alternatives to the proprietary silos
# kaniini it is about building technology that allow for an (mostly) open social graph that people can consume on their own terms
# kaniini it is also about making sure that the intentions of our users are correctly enforced
# kaniini if a user posts something non-public, it should at least degrade to being treated as a DM
# kaniini by building software that puts the user and their intentions first, we can accomplish our collective goals
# kaniini talking about numbers or stats or whatever does not get us where we need to go
# kaniini the numbers that matter are not how many eyeballs individual fediverse platforms have, but instead, how many eyeballs we are taking away from the proprietary services
# kaniini those are the numbers i want to see
# kaniini how much $$$ are we taking out of twitter and facebook stock values
# kaniini yes, data analytics of the fediverse is useful in terms of keeping an eye on metrics, but it's not about competition amongst ourselves
# melody the place those numbers matter is more in like, how much you're willing to bend over backwards writing specialized code to federate with the 5 people who won't leave GNU Social
# kaniini right