#social 2020-09-29
2020-09-29 UTC
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tinyrabbit maymay: thank you! That was probably the best read I've had on the subject so far!
# sl007 tinyrabbit See the talks for http://conf.activitypub.rocks/#talks - we face the same, described in my talk, see also https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/
# sl007 ^ by 1 of our keynote speakers. If you want to join live, join the waitlist …
# tinyrabbit sl007: thanks!
# sl007 tinyrabbit welcome, conf-co-organiser here, so if you have questions, feel free to ask, we are also in "apconf" on freenode or otherwise the official forum https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks is made for questions and et. al : For your proposals for the Birds of feather sessions and hackathon ideas for #apconf2020 !
# tinyrabbit Hah! Awesome to stumble in here and find out there's a conference in the works :D
# tinyrabbit Signed up on the discourse instance now too. Hadn't even seen that before.
# tinyrabbit Open question for everyone, and I know the answer is "it depends" but I'd still like your thoughts: I have a BS in CS, but I haven't done any "real" programming for 5-6 years. Now I've been looking at Go and pondering a good first project to learn it. I'm considering building a small social network node based on ActivityPub. How many hours would
# tinyrabbit you estimate an undertaking like that to take? And when I've implemented AP + Webfinger, OAuth2, HTTP Signatures, how compatible would my network be with existing instances like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, etc?
# maymay tinyrabbit: it depends if you'd be using existing libraries or forking an existing implementation vs. starting from scratch (which I'd only recommend if you're looking for a challenging learning exercice ;)
# tinyrabbit maymay: I'm looking at either doing it from scratch or using the go-fed library :)
# maymay a few us are trying to make the former easier with https://commonspub.org and there's similar initiative in other languages (like go-fed)
# tinyrabbit forking an existing project when I'm new to the language feels like a big challenge of its own
# maymay it depends on your learning style I guess, but unfortunately a lot of implementation details exist mostly in code rather than docs at this stage
# tinyrabbit even if I just aim for basic compatibility?
# maymay really depends on your definition of basic, but I'd say yes, or get ready for lots of trial and error
# tinyrabbit maymay: wow... That's a less than stellar starting point :D But let's assume I can get going a bit on my own and then dive into existing codebases later on when I have a better chance of navigating and understanding them. Are we talking about a 100 hour effort, or 1000? More?
# tinyrabbit I watched "The ActivityPub Panel" at https://conf.activitypub.rocks/#talks and Evan's closing question really got to me: "A whole bunch of studies show that the more time we spend on social media the more miserable we are" -- I believe some of that is because of algorithmic feeds that show us stuff we envy, for example. But I don't *know* that, and
# tinyrabbit I guess my point is that none of us do, really. How do you guys think we can make social media help with our well-being?
# tinyrabbit I know that's a philosophical question more than a technical one, but last night I was trying to explain AP to my SO, and they asked me "Why do you want to build a social network? As in, of all the things you could build, why a social network?"
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@hvdsomp Indeed. @CrossrefOrg Event Data is cool. So cool they could even render it compliant to @w3c ActivityStreams2 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ (twitter.com/_/status/1310969991332802561)
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