Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
Yes, as co-facilitator of #FEP, that is the point. Highly in favor of a bottom-up 3-phase standards process designed to guarantee an open ecosystem and tech landscape. Wrote a bunch about that on #SocialHub:
GNU @Taler is free software, and @NGI_Taler has open calls to let you implement the payment system for your free software. It would totally make sense to apply at protocol level to solve it for #ActivityPub federation.
Iemand vanuit #Mastodon benadrukt het belang van #OpenStandaarden. Hij roept op dat daar meer financiering voor moet komen om deze door te ontwikkelen. Zeker in het licht van verregaande koppelingen tussen andere sociale media zoals Instagram en Facebook die hier grote budgetten voor hebben.
Ja, dat was ik denk ik, op het #CommonsNetwork event in Den Haag. Enige verwarring daarbij is dat ik niet van Mastodon ben, maar hen indirect wel vertegenwoordig. Ik sta nl. in het algemeel de Fedi voor en haar #OpenStandaarden. O.a. mede-faciliteer en representeer ik al geruime tijd de #SocialHub dev community en het #FEP process beheer.
Een interessante link voor #Overheden is ons #ActivityPub for Administrations 3-delige workshop die we in 2021 georganiseerd als #SocialHub hebben. Hier is de link:
With NodeBB, Discourse and Flarum, this makes three #forum software that can now participate in the #Fediverse. The ongoing #SocialCG meeting will certainly endorse the new working group dedicated to topic-centric fediversity, along with @lemmy and @kbin.
For those who were not able to attend the technical alignment meeting of the informal "Threadiverse Working Group", I have taken minutes during the meeting and are sharing them here.
Thank you to all those who attended, we will meet again next month! Follow myself or the WG category to be notified about additional developments.
Attendees
Angus McLeod
Julian Lam
Evan Prodromou
Aaron Grey
Rimu Atkinson
Erlend Sogge Heggen
Laurens Hof
Other participants are not listed as they are not mentioned in notes below, but there were ~20 participants.
Notes
Participant introductions
“Forasphere”/”Foraverse” vs “Threadiverse”
Both have a topic-like structure and so much of the technical structure is the same
More helpful to focus on the differences from microblogging as the de facto implementation of ActivityPub
No matter what name, it is mostly UI distinctions with some different handling based on nomenclature
Rimu brings up discussion regarding nomenclature; related document
“We don’t call things the same words”
Aaron posits that “Circles” could be a useful common term
Julian posits that end of the day no implementor here will likely consider changing their already-established terminology
Aaron proposes a goal for the group: determine a common set of terms to use in discussions going forward; a lingua franca
Evan proposes a goal to produce documentation that other forum (or reddit-like alternatives) can use to become compatible
Additional goal (added later): reaching out to other forum devs (who aren’t already in this WG or looking into AP). Additional outreach/engagement from other forum softwares.
Julian suggests that perhaps the FEP process would be a possible path forward
Mastodon’s microblogging concept leads to other implementations following suit
Coordinated effort to increase compatibility between threadiverse-type applications is attractive
Erlend wants to see better interop between threadiverse apps. Discourse to NodeBB, etc.
Angus states that we’ve reached half-way point and summarizes (see above)
Meeting focus shifts to debate re: FEP process or Task force under SocialCG
Julian proposes on behalf of Johannes Ernst (in absentia) that the WG be organized under the FediDevs umbrella
Evan proposes that the WG be an official task force under the SocialCG
W3C/ActivityPub has many task forces already, one for data portability, one for webfinger, one for testing, etc.
Differences between task force report and FEP:
Both similar documents
FEP has a more asynchronous process for clearing out objections, less cohesion than SocialCG
Discussions take place on SocialHub
Most FEPs individually authored
SocialCG reports collaboratively edited and put forth to W3C
Some questions re: FEP process
Evan answers: Anyone can propose, comments collected. After 6 months author can determine it finalized, but implementation varies. Many draft FEPs are dropped due to lack of interest or are hypothetical in nature.
Penar asks whether FEP or W3C report process is faster
Both are roughly equivalent, SocialCG reports are “a few months” to draft, and “a few months” to be accepted/finalized.
Aaron posits that SWICG (or SocialCG) is a better group since it eventually goes into a published W3C article
Aim towards convergence, consistent UI. Safe and usable user experience where the end-user has choice.
Laurens remarks on the increased level of cooperation that has not been often found in the fediverse, sees this as an opportunity to forge a path toward what we want instead of being bound by an FEP.
Angus motions that we join the SWICG as a task force
Motion carries with 12 ayes out of 16 present
Next meeting of SWICG 5 Apr 1pm Eastern; Angus and Julian to attend
3pm Eastern; meeting scheduled end, Evan and Erlend (and some others) drop out
What do we call the group “foraverse” “forasphere” “threadiverse”
Benti posits that it is weird to call ourselves representatives of the threadiverse as that distinction is reserved for Lemmy and nutomic is not present
Julian suggests that the term is not exclusive to Lemmy/kbin and asks to simply expand the definition to include Piefed, Discourse, NodeBB, Flarum, et al.
Additional back and forth regarding how and where to carry on discussions outside of monthly calls
Shared Google Doc sufficient for now, can explore additional options later
Julian posits that a federated option is ideal, acknowledges bias when suggesting that NodeBB be used. However, as it would be federated, where the discussions take place is mostly incidental.
A federated solution would be easiest way to reach fediverse developers.
Angus motions that we call ourselves the Threadiverse Working Group (or Task Force)
Motion carries with 9 ayes out of 13 present
Action Items
Angus or Julian to set up shared Google Doc for meeting/agenda prep for next meeting
Meaning its optional. By no means is it required to discuss there, if you don't want to. For any FEP a forum topic is created, but you can discuss anywhere else.
Each FEP document in the #codeberg repo gets an accompanying tracking issue that list all the places where discussion takes place.
@Chocobozzz@dansup oh thats amazing to hear you are down for this collaboration. I wonder if it would make sense to open a thread on #SocialHub to work out what interoperability would look like? @smallcircles what do you think of a short form video fediverse working group?
How does this work.. The FEP-f1d5 talks about a node info endpoint, but the FEP states no obligatory endpoint. References lead to an old library that recommends /.well-known/x-nodeinfo2 (for that v2 library). How did a FEP become final without this crucial piece of information or am I simply missing that information in the finalised FEP? #ActivityPub#Fediverse
> Unit tests with real dependencies. Testcontainers is an open source framework for providing throwaway, lightweight instances of databases, message brokers, web browsers, or just about anything that can run in a Docker container.
I wanna do an ActivityPub API that's really just that... a robust, general purpose backend capable of serving a variety of client apps.
Maybe v2 would have customizable API for compatibility with existing clients.
First things first though... I checked with Awesome ActivityPub to see if there were any active projects already doing something like this that I could just jump in on.
@notroot there'd definitely be a need for what you wanna achieve. However, you will also find that what you want to build isn't straightforward at all, and you are working with the rough outline of an ultra-flexible protocol framework that still has a lot unspecified.
I'd advise joining #SocialHub and/or W3C SocialCG. People to follow are @helge (AP + Python) @hrefna (FeatherPub) and @steve (AP Linked Data), among others, who explore this space.
So, the thing about basing a communication protocol on json-ld (or any rdf format, it doesn't matter) is that it's an incredibly bad idea. To illustrate, consider the long term nuclear storage warning messages. And consider an rdf processor for those messages which understand the concept of places and events, but nothing else.
This is a place.
Something happened here.
It's still happening.
It's in the center of the place.
Thinking out loud: part of my thinking in how I am approaching #FeatherPub is what I started thinking of as the "boids model" of federated software development.
"But Hrefna, I sure as hell didn't hear about the 'boids model' in my SE classes"
Yes, this is just kind of my own colloquial thinking about it.
For those who are unaware, boids is an artificial life simulator based around the flocking behavior of birds. The idea is that we can simulate general flocking with a few basic rules.
Yes, but it is a good point. Not long ago I had this discussion about the fact that we all have these babylonian confusions in our discussions because we have never defined our own Ubiquitous language well enough.
What is an AP extension? What's a vocab? What's an instance? An app? Where do they fit, how do they relate? Or even what protocol layers do we discern?
The challenge is that the baseline features of activitypub are essentially impossible to build an effective client off of.
It's not just they are defining their own interfaces, it is that they have to define their own interfaces if they want to be even reasonably effective at their chosen tasks at scale because of the limitations on how collections can be dereferenced
There are ways around this with FEPs and such, but it's not in the protocol
For #ActivityPub the question of "Why use #LinkedData?" has never been answered. There should be clear merits to wade through all the complexity that this choice brings, right?
Yes, its ultra flexible, and you can define your own semantic #ontologies, and theoretically it could provide a robust extension mechanism to AP protocol. Except that right now it doesn't.
What's the vision of a Linked Data #Fediverse? What great innovative #SocialNetworking#UX would it bring, that makes it worthwhile?
For each FEP the editor team ensures that a discussion thread on the forum is present. Other than that there is a tracking issue in the FEP repo on #Codeberg that can track other places where discussions take place and feedback can be collected from.
SocialHub isn't important, but the FEP Process is, as 2nd-stage in the Standards Process. The place that sits between no formality and formality.
It's not required, just part of the default procedure. An author that submits a #FEP can just as well choose to collect feedback in other channels, update insights on the tracking issue, and improve the text with PR's without hitting up the #SocialHub forum.
A decentralized ecosystem will evolve in many different ways. The bottom-up Standards Process needs good procedures and see them popularized, so they become natural. There's much to improve, both in FEP Process and also #W3C.
I feel that it is important that #SocialHub does not assert authority. As a dev community on #ActivityPub it should be an attractive place to be part of and interact with others. That's all. So it is just one hub in the decentralized ecosystem.
We seek collab with other communities, and have a liaison with the #SocialCG.
We facilitate the #FEP Process, but the process itself stands on its own.
So parentheses in 3-stage Standards Process: Ecosystem --> FEP (SocialHub) --> W3C.
Indeed. I do not think that machine-readable specs are feasible.
The only thing that #ActivityPub#ComplianceProfiles (or whatever the name) do is saying on an endpoint "I comply to these specs/feps/w3c-artifacts and here you can find docs if you wanna integrate". See the sketch of this #FEP idea.
Followed-up to my 3-months old proposal for a bottom-up 3-stage Standards Process to guarantee a decentralized and open ecosystem. A process that goes:
This has urgency, or corporate takeover is assured!
“Any decentralized [ecosystem] requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”