I had a whole chapter for the ActivityPub book that I never got around to doing. I just finished it. I don't think my editor is going to be happy, since it's going to make the book too big, but I'd rather have to cut back than live with regrets.
Is there an Internet Media Type for social microsyntax, the plain-text source format that is used to convert @-mentions, hashtags, and URLs into links in HTML5? I've been unable to find one, and have fallen back to text/plain.
@evan well, that's just one example... if you wanted to look at hashtags, then what is there to actually do with them from a parsing standpoint? they don't translate to links. they're just meant to make searching for them easier as a token. auto-linking to a local filter/search is a courtesy that isn't actually crucial to their function. and you still have to consider the usual "which characters are allowed", "how do you delimit them", "which character starts them" -- what about bangtags? etc
Another ActivityPub question! I haven't seen a good description of using the provideClientKey and signClientKey properties. We've had a couple of questions in the AP GitHub issues about how to use them. Where did they come from? Does any AP server have a working implementation? They seem very mysterious.
One of the things we talked about in the Social Web Working Group was how to include binary data in the ActivityPub objects, like an Image. One proposed technique was to base64-encode the data and include it in content; another option was to use data: URLs in the url property of the object. Do any ActivityPub processors currently include inline images or other binary data?
@blaine I'm trying to do some research on the origin of WebFinger for my ActivityPub book. Do you have a favourite page that lays out the story? Wikipedia is not that helpful. I am pretty sure it was you, @bradfitz and Eran Hammer who originated the idea..?
@evan I'm not sure it's well documented, tbh. It might be easier to do a call (and would be lovely to catch up anyhow), but as I remember it John Panzer and I had a conversation at one of the Social Foos that was the origin point. The basic question/idea was: "if xmpp is dead, how do we do usernames in a federated-over-http world?" DNS wouldn't work because reasons, but Gmail meant every email user had an associated http server. Eran was working (iirc) on well-known, and Brad coined the name.
@evan In high school in the mid-to-late 1980’s my friends and I would play out the NCAA basketball tournament using Intellivision Basketball, handicapping the teams by giving the higher seeds better players
"I mean, this might sound strange, but music is a kind of coordination technology. So 4/4 techno beat is maybe the most clear communication of that. It’s so easy to participate in. It’s fairly easy to make. It’s also fairly easy to dance to and understand. So I feel like as a kind of — if I want to call it a kind of protocol, it’s an easy way to communicate what to do in that scenario. So I think that that’s why people have organized around it so much."
@tshirtman@evan I've found that the pro Russia agitators are some of the least trustworthy in general. Take Jackson Hinkle, who is saying pro-Palestine stuff for now, but has been generally okay with supporting (and denying) ethnic cleansing of Kurds by Assad.
So even when those people are right once, it seems based on "America bad" rather than any supporting anything good. Which means they're often okay with also supporting super lousy stuff.
@nus@evan yeah, i don't know this one in particular, but i've seen people use the palestinian cause to push pro-assad narratives, it's disgusting. I believe it's a strategy of co-opting passions about important subjects and redirect them into their particular politics, rather than being accidentally right about one thing.
@mlinksva it is fun, though, to read very old articles about identi.ca and realize that the shortcomings mentioned are just as relevant today as they were then.
“The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web[…]
“The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. […]”