15:59:06 <RRSAgent> RRSAgent has joined #social
15:59:06 <RRSAgent> logging to https://www.w3.org/2020/02/08-social-irc
15:59:14 <nightpool> Zakim, this is mumble on dustycloud.org / port 64738 / password “goblincamp”
15:59:14 <Zakim> got it, nightpool
15:59:18 <nightpool> RRSAgent, make logs public
15:59:32 <nightpool> Meeting: Social CG Telecon
15:59:43 <nightpool> cwebber2, are you chairing or should I?
16:00:06 <emacsen> emacsen has joined #social
16:00:16 <cwebber2> nightpool: why don't you chair
16:00:20 <cwebber2> and I can scribe
16:00:27 <nightpool> sounds good
16:00:32 <nightpool> Chair: nightpool
16:00:41 <cwebber2> scribe: cwebber2
16:00:47 <nightpool> Agenda: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/2-8-socialcg-telecon/507
16:01:03 <nightpool> ScribeNick: cwebber2
16:01:29 <nightpool[m]> Cool, let me jump on mumble and we'll get started
16:01:35 <cwebber2> great
16:03:29 <cwebber2> nightpool: thanks everyone for coming, why don't we start with intros
16:03:45 <cwebber2> nightpool: I'm nightpool, I'm a mastodon developer and contributor and co-chair for the socialcg
16:04:22 <lanodan> Hi, I'm lanodan, pleroma full-time developer and admin of my own instance at queer.hacktivis.me (got no mic)
16:04:40 <lanodan> Yeah
16:04:49 <tsyesika> tsyesika has joined #social
16:05:29 <cwebber2> cwebber2: I'm Chris Webber, worked on ActivityPub, now working on Spritely, co-chair of the socialcg
16:06:05 <emacsen> sorry, my mumble is acting up
16:06:07 <cwebber2> emacsen: I'm Serge, I'm interested in federated social web stuff, I'm currently working on Datashards, which I hope to be adopted as a complementary project to AP in the future
16:06:12 <emacsen> I had to poke it
16:06:40 <sl007> Hi I am Sebastian and doing redaktor.me (inherently-social website-building software capable of serving website-building needs of institutions, journalist organisations, citizen journalism and photo/film documentary.
16:06:41 <sl007>  ;)
16:06:42 <emacsen> present+
16:06:43 <melody> present+
16:06:44 <cwebber2> present+
16:06:45 <nightpool[m]> present+
16:06:45 <lanodan> present+
16:06:45 <tsyesika> present+
16:06:49 <sl007> present+
16:06:52 <nedjo> present+
16:07:03 <cwebber2> present+ setthemffree-at-mamot-dot-fr
16:08:36 <cwebber2> melody: I'm Melody, working on social tech, not necessarily activitypub, just in general, I'm also interested in mitigating anti-harassment online
16:08:58 <cwebber2> setthemfree-at-memot-dot-fr: My name is Yury, I'm just curious about the future of the Fediverse, trying to figure out how to explain it to people in my city, country, language space etc. So I'm here just out of curiousity:)
16:09:38 <cwebber2> nedjo: I'm nedjo, I'm active in Drupal dev, for the last few years I've been working at a Drupal distro acalled Drutopia, we're looking at integrating AP for Drupal
16:10:26 <cwebber2> sl007: I'm Sebastian / sebi, I'm doing redaktor.me which is a social CMS, designed for the needs of journalists and photojournalists.  I was a documentary photojournalist who switched to coding
16:11:15 <cwebber2> cwebber2: tsyesika asked for me to give her intro, she's co-editor / co-author of activitypub, used to work on mediagoblin with me
16:11:40 <cwebber2> nightpool: ok, I wrote some broad topics of interest, then we can move onto other stuff people are working
16:12:00 <cwebber2> nightpool: I know people are interested in ocap stuff and datashards so if cwebber2 and emacsen can give an update
16:12:18 <nightpool[m]> ScribeNick: nightpool
16:12:37 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: Alright, i'll give an update on OCAPub and pass it over to Serge to do datashards.
16:13:17 <nightpool[m]> cwebber2 (IRC): so, the status of OCAP stuff is that there was an OCAPub spec a while ago, and that stuff is near completion
16:13:22 <cwebber2> cwebber2: ocap social network discussion https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cap-talk/icey8aO5ABo
16:13:27 <cwebber2> cwebber2: confused deputy testing https://groups.google.com/d/msg/cap-talk/5Q8BM3aW0Gw/lHzTgXaQAgAJ
16:13:54 <nightpool[m]> cwebber2 (IRC): i've been trying to get security review, especially from the broader ocap community, through the cap-talk mailing list
16:14:34 <sl007> q+
16:15:06 <nightpool[m]> cwebber2: There's some good discussion on non-ocappub specific social networking capability secuity there on the first link and then also some specific security review in the second link
16:15:21 <cwebber2> scribenick: cwebber2
16:15:51 <cwebber2> cwebber2: I've also been working on something called Spritely Goblins, which is ocap related, but more foundational, so not *directly* AP related though will be used for that
16:15:55 <setthemfree> setthemfree has joined #social
16:15:59 <cwebber2> ack sl007
16:16:02 <cwebber2> ack sl
16:16:05 <nightpool[m]> ScribeNick: cwebber2
16:16:29 <cwebber2> sl007: a question about object capabilities... I can give feedback about the feedback from 37c3 and OFFDEM... was full of AP sessions for one day
16:16:58 <cwebber2> sl007: my question goes out to lanodan, but because what we saw at the event is that pleroma specified its own ocap system called litepub
16:17:16 <cwebber2> sl007: I'm concerned nobody else will use it
16:17:48 <lanodan> LitePub is more like a profile of ActivityPub not really some restriction, our IR is more liberal
16:18:10 <lanodan> And yeah I'm involved in LitePub
16:18:25 <cwebber2> nightpool: to give context, I haven't heard much about litepub in the mastodon side, I definitely think there's spaces to give unificiation to ocappub
16:18:26 <cwebber2> q+
16:18:36 <cwebber2> nightpool: but I think those two things are working in the same space
16:18:49 <lanodan> Yeah
16:18:55 <cwebber2> nightpool: I think it's fine to explore both and then figure out if it can be unified
16:19:08 <nightpool[m]> ack cwebber2 (IRC)
16:19:11 <nightpool[m]> ack cwebber
16:19:58 <nightpool[m]> https://git.sr.ht/~kaniini/draft-conill-bearcaps-uri-scheme
16:20:47 <lanodan> btw kaniini left the pleroma project so might need some kind of people taking over?
16:20:48 <cwebber2> cwebber2: kaniini and I both worked on bearcaps which could be used for both ocappub and litepub
16:21:12 <lanodan> And I can volunteer on this
16:21:23 <cwebber2> q?
16:21:54 <cwebber2> nightpool: ok emacsen, can you go forward on datashards?
16:22:12 <cwebber2> emacsen: datashards has been publicly quiet but privately active
16:22:26 <cwebber2> emacsen: we've been working on a better URI scheme, and better support for efficient storage of small data
16:22:35 <cwebber2> emacsen: and also support for large storage, which didn't exist before
16:22:45 <cwebber2> emacsen: and also some new store URI support, using bearcaps
16:23:02 <cwebber2> emacsen: I anticipate that'll take a couple of weeks, and then we can look at public AP integration
16:23:13 <cwebber2> nightpool: this may be the first time people have heard of datashards, can you describe it?
16:23:27 <cwebber2> emacsen: the goal of the project is secure storage of data that is not reliant on where it lives for it to be secure
16:23:55 <nedjo> More info on datashards: https://datashards.net
16:23:57 <cwebber2> emacsen: that means we can do data collectives where we store each others' data with blindness to what the content is
16:24:11 <cwebber2> nightpool: from an activitypub perspective the goal is to address decentralized storage
16:24:34 <cwebber2> emacsen: that's right, if used in AP if nodes go down temporarily or permanently and activities would not be lost to time if they were still interesting to the network
16:24:34 <cwebber2> q+
16:24:45 <nightpool[m]> ack cwebber
16:25:13 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: One thing to add is that mutable datashards might help with account migration, where if your node goes down, you can repoint it to a new node
16:25:19 <sl007> q+
16:25:38 <nightpool[m]> ack sl
16:26:08 <cwebber2> sl007: Chris said it might help with account migration, what would help the most?  the world won't change, is that correct?  if you migrate an account the URI stays the same?
16:26:15 <nightpool[m]> s/world/url
16:26:36 <cwebber2> emacsen: I think that's a long question to answer, better served offline
16:26:51 <sl007> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/is-objects-id-immutable/381
16:26:56 <cwebber2> nightpool: but yeah the broad idea is that there's a decentralized identifier that doesn't change
16:27:00 <cwebber2> emacsen: yes
16:27:07 <cwebber2> q?
16:27:36 <cwebber2> sl007: not a question but I put a link about account migration, so I put in a link there for emacsen to look at
16:28:03 <cwebber2> nightpool: to give a summary of a link, people are looking at username changing, and there's some debate about whether mutable or immutable identifiers make sense
16:28:22 <cwebber2> nightpool: I think that conversation may be out of scope...
16:28:31 <cwebber2> sl007: I linked it so that we can continue the conversation there
16:28:36 <cwebber2> nightpool: sounds good
16:29:07 <cwebber2> nightpool: looks like that covers the ocap and datashards stuff, but I'd like to give some space to queue up on other items to talk about
16:29:21 <cwebber2> nightpool: I could schedule the other ones for later
16:29:57 <cwebber2> nightpool: the queuing system works so that if you type q+, it's like raising your hand, the chair will look to the speaker queue to find out who's next
16:30:03 <cwebber2> q?
16:30:45 <cwebber2> nightpool: looks like nobody else has something to queue, so let's go with the agenda items
16:30:59 <cwebber2> nightpool: so the next one is FEDERATION.md and interop by darius
16:31:14 <cwebber2> nightpool: some documentation of objects and activities for specialized instances
16:31:33 <sl007> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/documenting-federation-behavior-in-a-semi-standard-way/453
16:31:35 <cwebber2> nightpool: the idea is that when you are implementing a specialized server that goes only over a subset of activities
16:31:47 <cwebber2> nightpool: it basically describes an interface of supported types
16:31:59 <cwebber2> nightpool: darius is working on an event-planning system
16:32:08 <nightpool[m]> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/documenting-federation-behavior-in-a-semi-standard-way/453/10
16:32:34 <cwebber2> nightpool: kind of like meetup place called ???
16:32:54 <cwebber2> nightpool: has added federation support, added this FEDERATION.md where you can document what you can write and respond to
16:33:03 <sl007> q+
16:33:03 <cwebber2> nightpool: if anyone has thoughts and feedback on this I'd love to hear
16:33:29 <nightpool[m]> s/a meetup place/a meetup.com replacement/
16:33:34 <nightpool[m]> s/???/gath.io/
16:33:41 <cwebber2> sl007: for redaktor.me we started writing a FEDERATION.md and we like it
16:33:49 <cwebber2> sl007: there was a machine-readable one described
16:33:59 <lanodan> Quite weird to pick markdown instead of like something a bit like swagger so it can be more or less parseable (could be useful to hint that like Honk doesn't support Like to an user).
16:34:02 <cwebber2> sl007: we aim for maximum interoperability and I think this is quite the right way
16:34:23 <cwebber2> q+
16:34:33 <nedjo> q+
16:34:40 <sl007> q+
16:34:44 <cwebber2> ack sl
16:34:45 <sl007> q-
16:34:47 <nightpool[m]> ack sl
16:34:49 <nightpool[m]> ack cwebber
16:35:16 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: I think it's good to identify this as the abstract problem that it is, which is interface descriptions
16:35:31 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: that is, the interface between clients and servers and between servers themselves
16:35:39 <nedjo> q-
16:35:48 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: The thing I find interesting about FEDERATION.md is that it is human readable, and it's not interested in being machine readable.
16:36:11 <melody> q+
16:36:21 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: designing a machine readable form of this could take a very long time, and there are a couple of projects like Hydra that have attempted to do so
16:36:49 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: we thought about a similar JSON document when we were writing activitypub, defining the types you'd allow
16:37:08 <cwebber2> nightpool: could you give more context, did it fall out of scope?
16:37:29 <sl007> cwebber2 FYI, found the machine readable thing https://github.com/jhass/nodeinfo
16:37:32 <Loqi_> [jhass] nodeinfo: NodeInfo defines a standardized way to expose metadata about an installation of a distributed social network
16:38:36 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: this was something discussed very earlier in the SocialCG's existence, right after the social web working group ended.
16:39:08 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: there were two proposals, one for a .well-known kind of thing, and one where an actor's profile pointed at this kind of information
16:39:20 <melody> q+
16:39:22 <sl007> q+
16:39:23 <cwebber2> q?
16:39:41 <cwebber2> nightpool: I remember this a bit more now that you've jogged my memory, this was part of the node-info stuff and client negotiation stuff
16:40:14 <nightpool[m]> cwebber: the broader context of this was discussions around server-level information, and how much information should be provided on the software and where that informatino should live
16:40:25 <nightpool[m]> s/informatino/information/
16:40:49 <cwebber2> melody: I just wanted to say I think one of the things I like about FEDERATION.md is that in a lot of ways just knowing the types isn't enough, there's a certain point you need the human intervention to understand the semantics of what the types are and how they're used... especially in some of the ways people stretch the meaning of types of what they expect of very different things.  I think it makes sense to have something a human can
16:40:49 <cwebber2> read and interpret
16:41:15 <cwebber2> melody: important before you get into the brass tacks to get to why it's represented that way
16:41:19 <lanodan> Yeah, this is why I think it should be more like a description on how each activity is understood (like how Mastodon used to except 500 characters for as:Note). So if it's a JSON it's more like a list of description per activity name.
16:41:59 <cwebber2> nightpool: yeah I also talked a bit about how this is relevant to specialized clients and generic servers.  There's a bit of tension between how people are using AP (specialized servers) vs how designed (generic server).  I think this is one thing that arises out of that tension
16:42:20 <cwebber2> q+
16:42:22 <cwebber2> q?
16:42:30 <nightpool[m]> ack melody
16:42:34 <nightpool[m]> ack sl
16:42:58 <cwebber2> sl007: I think it's most important that we get people together and talk, more important than machine-readable thing for sure
16:43:11 <cwebber2> sl007: I posted a link into irc of nodeinfo
16:43:30 <cwebber2> sl007: which has some integration for the following softwares [long list, including some AP ones ...]
16:43:35 <cwebber2> sl007: like half of the AP universe
16:43:45 <cwebber2> sl007: I wanted to link it but didn't have time
16:44:22 <cwebber2> nightpool: just to describe, nodeinfo is something run by the server, so there's one nodeinfo document per server.  Note that nodeinfo is a very restrictive spec... it does have some compatibility info but very coarse
16:44:28 <cwebber2> nightpool: it does have some metadata information
16:44:39 <cwebber2> nightpool: I know pleroma uses it for some additional info for s2s federation
16:44:41 <cwebber2> q?
16:44:49 <nightpool[m]> ack cwebber
16:45:39 <nightpool> cwebber2: first off, I'm very glad to hear how widely supported nodeinfo is, and secondly I think both of these approaches are valuable
16:46:35 <nightpool> ... I think it would be very sad if FEDERATION.md was the only way of approaching this, and I think nodeinfo is valuable as a very broad "survey" of what is currently implemented on the fediverse
16:46:52 <nightpool> ... but notably, and this is why we originally suggested a simple JSON list of types, is that getting this kind of rich granularity is very, very hard.
16:47:03 <nightpool> ... it's hard to build this kind of contract language that can describe these features well
16:47:34 <melody> q+
16:47:37 <nightpool> ... and in the meanwhile, I'm very excited about FEDERATION.md, even if it isn't machine readable, because it gives insight into what kind of things implementors are doing and care about
16:47:42 <nightpool> ack melody
16:48:23 <nightpool> q+
16:48:46 <cwebber2> melody: I agree, and I think it's good that we also have something that's machine readable, especially for simple negotiation between C2S & S2S.  I also love that FEDERATION.md does not try to be that thing, because there's so much unspecified side effect behavior and etc, and I'm not sure how to represent in a machine-parasable way, and it's great to explain to a human what you're doing with all that.  I think both approaches are
16:48:46 <cwebber2> necessary for different things and different reasons.
16:48:57 <cwebber2> melody: I'm looking forward to the possibilities that opens up
16:49:44 <cwebber2> nightpool: yes I think the things people have said, there's value to two approaches, one that's machine readable coarse thing, and then we can iteratively make it more fine grained where that granularity is useful, and a very fine-grained but human readable FEDERATION.md and we can aggregate some of that information
16:49:59 <cwebber2> nightpool: it might be useful to do something as if it were a survey of a fediverse
16:50:09 <cwebber2> nightpool: maybe there's a way to link to it on the fediverse and represent it
16:51:21 <cwebber2> nightpool: one issue I have with nodeinfo is you can't do two on the same server... one issue with mastodon is our dependency on fediverse has made it hard to deploy on the same domain (eg deploying alongside nextcloud).  I think going forward, especially with the way AP was designed, would love to see things happen on the actor level.  That can be then collected in the same way we collect nodeinfo.  I think that makes more sense
16:51:22 <cwebber2> especially as we move into C2S and other kinds of servers
16:51:30 <cwebber2> q+
16:51:33 <nightpool> ack nightpool
16:51:38 <nightpool> ack cwebber2
16:51:44 <nightpool> ack cwebber
16:52:33 <cwebber2> cwebber2: I just like to say that I liked how we started achieving consensus and it's nice when a community does that
16:52:38 <sl007> full ack
16:53:28 <cwebber2> nightpool: great!  these next two agenda items are about issues for activitypub developers, and ways to make AP more approachable and accessible.  The first of these is a draft guide for AP implementors written by nedjo, haven't had time to read the whole thing but it looks very thorough
16:53:34 <cwebber2> nightpool: nedjo, want to give an overview?
16:54:58 <cwebber2> nedjo: sure!  so I'm relatively new to AP, I've gone through a process similar to most of you... I looked around and started to collect what I needed to get going, found some notes, and saw conversations about that.  I saw the drafts about activitypub.rocks site, started working on that dividing it into three parts: general intro to AP, one generally short guide for users who want to get using, and the third is a guide for AP
16:54:58 <cwebber2> implementors
16:55:11 <cwebber2> nedjo: this is here in this wiki just as an interim step I think
16:55:24 <cwebber2> nedjo: I'm interested in participating in improving it and finding a more usable site for it
16:56:04 <cwebber2> nedjo: balancing it with a need for a format that can be easily community edited... "oh, I didn't put anything with FEDERATION.md here!"... so that's the current status!
16:56:28 <nightpool[m]> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/draft-guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers/479
16:56:37 <cwebber2> nightpool: right now it exists as a publicly editable wiki, linked above
16:56:44 <cwebber2> q+
16:56:58 <nightpool[m]> ack cwebber
16:57:39 <nedjo> q+
16:57:50 <nightpool[m]> ack nedjo
16:58:08 <cwebber2> cwebber2: this looks great, think it's been needed, how to get it on ap.rocks also is a conversation
16:58:49 <cwebber2> nedjo: great, I'd love to talk about next steps, maybe a team or etc that works on it, or?  I think getting some group review would be really important because obviously I'm coming as a relative newcomer and want to put what I come up with that it's had more eyes on it
16:58:59 <cwebber2> q+ to suggest we follow this up on the next meeting
16:59:11 <cwebber2> nedjo: maybe we can have a documentation team and get it somewhere
16:59:59 <cwebber2> nightpool: yes we should follow up with this next meeting, and let's get updates to ap.rocks website in feb
17:00:49 <emacsen> +1
17:00:53 <lanodan> +1
17:00:54 <cwebber2> cwebber2: big thank you to nightpool for organizing and running the meeting, great work :)
17:01:01 <nedjo> +1
17:01:32 <cwebber2> nightpool: sounds like we have a great set of next steps, want to make sure it gets even better in 2020.  I think that's all we have for today, we'll continue this stuff on socialhub.ap.rocks
17:01:44 <cwebber2> nightpool: my guess is next meeting will be in 2 weeks, I'll make a new agenda item for it and we can fill it in
17:01:51 <cwebber2> nightpool: have a good day everyone!
17:01:55 <lanodan> Bye o/
17:02:34 <nightpool[m]> Zakim, bye
17:02:34 <Zakim> leaving.  As of this point the attendees have been emacsen, melody, cwebber, nightpool[m], lanodan, tsyesika, sl, nedjo, setthemffree-at-mamot-dot-fr
17:02:34 <Zakim> Zakim has left #social
17:02:38 <nightpool[m]> RRSAgent, make logs public
17:02:44 <nightpool[m]> RRSAgent, create minutes
17:02:44 <RRSAgent> I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2020/02/08-social-minutes.html nightpool[m]
17:02:51 <nightpool[m]> RRSAgent, bye
17:02:51 <RRSAgent> I see no action items