Social CG Telecon -- 08 Feb 2020

<nightpool> cwebber2, are you chairing or should I?

nightpool: why don't you chair

and I can scribe

<nightpool> sounds good

<scribe> scribe: cwebber2

<nightpool> ScribeNick: cwebber2

great

nightpool: thanks everyone for coming, why don't we start with intros
... I'm nightpool, I'm a mastodon developer and contributor and co-chair for the socialcg

<lanodan> Hi, I'm lanodan, pleroma full-time developer and admin of my own instance at queer.hacktivis.me (got no mic)

<lanodan> Yeah

cwebber2: I'm Chris Webber, worked on ActivityPub, now working on Spritely, co-chair of the socialcg

<emacsen> sorry, my mumble is acting up

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

<emacsen> I had to poke it

<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.

<sl007> ;)

melody: I'm Melody, working on social tech, not necessarily activitypub, just in general, I'm also interested in mitigating anti-harassment online

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:)

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

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

cwebber2: tsyesika asked for me to give her intro, she's co-editor / co-author of activitypub, used to work on mediagoblin with me

nightpool: ok, I wrote some broad topics of interest, then we can move onto other stuff people are working
... I know people are interested in ocap stuff and datashards so if cwebber2 and emacsen can give an update

cwebber2: ocap social network discussion https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cap-talk/icey8aO5ABo
... confused deputy testing https://groups.google.com/d/msg/cap-talk/5Q8BM3aW0Gw/lHzTgXaQAgAJ

<scribe> scribenick: 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

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
... my question goes out to lanodan, but because what we saw at the event is that pleroma specified its own ocap system called litepub
... I'm concerned nobody else will use it

<lanodan> LitePub is more like a profile of ActivityPub not really some restriction, our IR is more liberal

<lanodan> And yeah I'm involved in LitePub

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
... but I think those two things are working in the same space

<lanodan> Yeah

nightpool: I think it's fine to explore both and then figure out if it can be unified

<lanodan> btw kaniini left the pleroma project so might need some kind of people taking over?

cwebber2: kaniini and I both worked on bearcaps which could be used for both ocappub and litepub

<lanodan> And I can volunteer on this

nightpool: ok emacsen, can you go forward on datashards?

emacsen: datashards has been publicly quiet but privately active
... we've been working on a better URI scheme, and better support for efficient storage of small data
... and also support for large storage, which didn't exist before
... and also some new store URI support, using bearcaps
... I anticipate that'll take a couple of weeks, and then we can look at public AP integration

nightpool: this may be the first time people have heard of datashards, can you describe it?

emacsen: the goal of the project is secure storage of data that is not reliant on where it lives for it to be secure

<nedjo> More info on datashards: https://datashards.net

emacsen: that means we can do data collectives where we store each others' data with blindness to what the content is

nightpool: from an activitypub perspective the goal is to address decentralized storage

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

sl007: Chris said it might help with account migration, what would help the most? the url won't change, is that correct? if you migrate an account the URI stays the same?

emacsen: I think that's a long question to answer, better served offline

<sl007> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/is-objects-id-immutable/381

nightpool: but yeah the broad idea is that there's a decentralized identifier that doesn't change

emacsen: yes

sl007: not a question but I put a link about account migration, so I put in a link there for emacsen to look at

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
... I think that conversation may be out of scope...

sl007: I linked it so that we can continue the conversation there

nightpool: sounds good
... 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
... I could schedule the other ones for later
... 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
... looks like nobody else has something to queue, so let's go with the agenda items
... so the next one is FEDERATION.md and interop by darius
... some documentation of objects and activities for specialized instances

<sl007> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/documenting-federation-behavior-in-a-semi-standard-way/453

nightpool: the idea is that when you are implementing a specialized server that goes only over a subset of activities
... it basically describes an interface of supported types
... darius is working on an event-planning system
... kind of like meetup place called gath.io
... has added federation support, added this FEDERATION.md where you can document what you can write and respond to
... if anyone has thoughts and feedback on this I'd love to hear

sl007: for redaktor.me we started writing a FEDERATION.md and we like it
... there was a machine-readable one described

<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).

sl007: we aim for maximum interoperability and I think this is quite the right way

nightpool: could you give more context, did it fall out of scope?

<sl007> cwebber2 FYI, found the machine readable thing https://github.com/jhass/nodeinfo

<Loqi_> [jhass] nodeinfo: NodeInfo defines a standardized way to expose metadata about an installation of a distributed social network

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

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

read and interpret

melody: important before you get into the brass tacks to get to why it's represented that way

<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.

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

sl007: I think it's most important that we get people together and talk, more important than machine-readable thing for sure
... I posted a link into irc of nodeinfo
... which has some integration for the following softwares [long list, including some AP ones ...]
... like half of the AP universe
... I wanted to link it but didn't have time

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
... it does have some metadata information
... I know pleroma uses it for some additional info for s2s federation

<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

<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

<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.

<nightpool> ... it's hard to build this kind of contract language that can describe these features well

<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

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

necessary for different things and different reasons.

melody: I'm looking forward to the possibilities that opens up

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
... it might be useful to do something as if it were a survey of a fediverse
... maybe there's a way to link to it on the fediverse and represent it
... 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

especially as we move into C2S and other kinds of servers

cwebber2: I just like to say that I liked how we started achieving consensus and it's nice when a community does that

<sl007> full ack

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
... nedjo, want to give an overview?

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

implementors

nedjo: this is here in this wiki just as an interim step I think
... I'm interested in participating in improving it and finding a more usable site for it
... 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!

nightpool: right now it exists as a publicly editable wiki, linked above

cwebber2: this looks great, think it's been needed, how to get it on ap.rocks also is a conversation

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
... maybe we can have a documentation team and get it somewhere

nightpool: yes we should follow up with this next meeting, and let's get updates to ap.rocks website in feb

<emacsen> +1

<lanodan> +1

cwebber2: big thank you to nightpool for organizing and running the meeting, great work :)

<nedjo> +1

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
... 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
... have a good day everyone!

<lanodan> Bye o/

- DRAFT -

Social CG Telecon

08 Feb 2020

Attendees

Contents

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

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