NodeBB is at this year's FediForum, and one of the breakout sessions centred around the Theadiverse, the subset of ActivityPub-enabled applications built around a topic-centric model of content representation.
Some of the topic touched upon included:
Aligning on a standard representation for collections of Notes
FEP-1b12 — Group federation and implementation thereof by Lemmy, et al.
Offering a comparatively more feature-rich experience vis-a-vis restrictions re: microblogging
Going forward: collaborating on building compatible threadiverse implementations
The main action item involved the genesis of an informal working group for the threadiverse, in order to align our disparate implementations toward a common path.
We intend to meet monthly at first, with the first meeting likely sometime early-to-mid April.
The topic of the first WG call is: Representation of the higher level collection of Notes (posts, etc.) — Article vs. Page, etc?
Interested?
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As an aside, I'd love to try something new and attempt to keep as much of this as I can on the social web. Can you do me a favour and boost this to your followers?
@Edent yea but with cryptocurrency, the perpetrators were actively trying to avoid the existing financial regulation. But with new social platforms, a lot of the devs and admins are new at this. They don't know about the existing body of knowledge. Part of what's driving the growth in the fediverse is that it's a new way to interact with the web for a lot of ppl
how to scalably introduce the concept of ACL at the post/toot level.
Very interested to hear yall’s ideas on this.
how to educate about the #fediverse in a user-friendly way
…and an accurate way. I think a lot of the blowups on the fediverse come from the way mastodon misrepresents the fediverse to ppl, notably that it’s privacy-focused.
how do we handle #GDPR compliance when federating in and out?
I’d be interested to hear what yall come up with for this too. It seems like ActivityPub is strictly incompatible with GDPR. If a user asks to delete their data, you can comply on your server but never guarantee that it’s deleted from the network. And then there’s the permission requirement for sharing data, which seems to mean basic federation isn’t allowed without a user’s explicit permission.
How do people against the #BlueSky bridge feel about https://rss-parrot.net/? I saw nothing but praise for that when it was announced a little while back, but it’s the same thing. It’s a bridge translating one protocol to another, meaning someone’s public posts could end up on a platform they didn’t opt-in to.
@volkris Well, yeah. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think the demands to make things opt-in make much sense because the fediverse works by allowing your posts to be fetched by any other server.
it’s not so simple
I think that is simple, but regardless, my question was simple. If you think opt-in should be the default and ppl should be able to determine where and how their posts are distributed, then isn’t rss-parrot (and the similar projects that have existed for years) just as bad as the bridgy-fed?
In fact, this has been done multiple times. There was some software release recently that did that in reverse (RSS Parot I think?). For some reason, ppl complaining about their consent didn’t have a problem with bridging that content without permission.
How many fedi users understand that? Know what RSS is? If it were explained to them, how might they react?
How many fedi users understand the basics of how federation works? Not many, based on the outrage of a bridge using the same federation protocol as their own server.
That too comes down to mental model of fedi sociality, I think, though.
Yes and I think a lot of these ppl complaining about bridging have an incorrect mental model of the fediverse. It was never a private haven, unless they are using allow-list federation. They have a view of the fediverse with very discrete and defined boundaries, but the fediverse is nebulous and crosses server/protocol/mediatype/etc boundaries
I reject the supremacy of code and standards over social norms. A social norm is not incorrect merely because the tech doesn’t work that way or the standard doesn’t spell it out.
You can’t claim there is a social norm that applies to everyone on the fediverse. The fediverse is not a single social group. It is a distributed collection of ppl and bots.
I reject the supremacy of code and standards over social norms
Maybe you meant this abstractly, but this quote seems to imply that you think social norms hold weight in arguments about features on the fediverse. Specifically, that the idea of “requiring consent” to federate posts means bridges must be opt-in rather than opt-out.
What I’m trying to express is that there is no social norm that can apply to the fediverse because it is not a single group. Therefore, any argument that uses social norms to dictate features on the fediverse, as a whole, are wrong. I am extremely in favor of ppl having the tools to control their own data and even build social groups where norms can be used to enforce things, but I don’t think that applies in this instance.
I also disagree with “Servers and services that expose fedi content beyond what its users understand to be usual-for-the-fedi are seeing the protests.“, but I don’t think its just about Bluesky. The same ppl mad about Bluesky are the one’s who get mad about search, quote posts, etc.
The problem is in part people’s social understanding of federation that seems to be largely imaginary.
I sorta agree with this, but I think it’s more that these ppl are ignoring federation. They don’t care how federation works as long as it gives them exactly the features they want and nothing else. And when they find servers doing something they don’t like, they get upset because they have no tools to stop it.
My read of the discourse today is that there are a lot of people who no longer want a follow model, but would like to switch to a full 'friend request yes/no' model for mastodon/fedi etc. Which is there but off by default, and has the same oddness as twitters 'private' mode, where you're still seen by everyone who followed beforehand.
It's the same desired public, but minus those people use case that we all want, and why publics are hard. https://epeus.blogspot.com/2008/04/digital-publics-conversations-and.html
I'm working on an idea to help organize and fund #OpenSource#UX leaning research. The problem? I'm rather inexperienced with how funding works in this space. Curious if anyone here could help me get the right perspective. My understanding is that there IS funding for Open Source, but it's fairly complicated and takes a lot of paperwork . The few folks I've talked to that have tried to get funding found it a bit exhausting. Are they wrong?
I don’t think that’s true. I think @tbernard was on the right track.
Left to their own devices many developers prefer working on performance, plumbing, etc
Development and UX aren’t mutually exclusive. My whole career I’ve worked on full stack web apps with Java backends. The enterprise companies I worked for weren’t paying for designers so we developers did all the UI/UX work (though enterprise apps don’t have the best UI either) Open source generally doesn’t have good design because the devs choose not to prioritize it.
it’s assumed that developers will contribute their time to projects because they care about them and are passionate. But it’s assumed that UX people will do it only if money is involved.
I’m not sure about this either. An open source project starts with code published with a VCS. That makes it easier for developers to contribute, but not designers who don’t know how to code. There’s literally no way for them to contribute without the devs. I think its that inherent lack of agency that prevents more designers from contributing
I'm glad to announce the release of version 2.46 of #snac, the simple, minimalistic #ActivityPub instance server written in C. It includes the following changes:
Added support for Peertube videos.
Mastodon API: Tweaks to support the Subway Tooter app (contributed by pswilde), added support for editing posts, fixed an error related to the edit date of a post, fixed some crashes.
Added a handshake emoji next to a user name if it's a mutual relation (follower and followed), because friendship is bliss.
Tweaked some retry timeout values for better behaviour in larger instances (thanks to me@mysmallinstance.homelinux.org for their help).
One thing science fiction writers should keep in mind is that your futuristic lingo for new tech should probably be minimal. The human tendency is to not adopt new words unless we need to. What we call a "phone" now does not even remotely resemble what it did in 1970, but we still just call it a "phone." We still "film" things and "rewind" and mac keyboards say "return." It's okay not to make up new words for everything.
@mishellbaker My 5 year old calls movies “videos” because he watched youtube videos way before we started watching movies with him.
I think one reason authors might do this is because language transition is slow and subtle. If you use a word the reader knows but to refer to something different, it may be confusing for the reader without the context. Imagine someone 100 years ago hearing someone talk about reading something on their phone.