<scribe> scribe: rhiaro
<cwebber2> ScribeNick: rhiaro
cwebber2: joost and sebastian
have done the most pre-call thinking about the topics
... I encouarge one of you to frame it
... I'm volunteering joost to start
joost: I work with NLNet
foundation
... we go back to the early days of internet working in the
netherlands and europe
... early pioneers in establishing open internet betwen EU and
US
... we put money into a fund (That's us)
... since then we are a public benefit fund, funded a lot of
internet architecture R&D
... currently we are doing that with EU funding within 3
calls
... the first since 2018 as part of next generation internet
initiatvie
... which has become this overly complex tangle of actions and
acronyms
... lots of interesting work
... we hope to continue to fund projects
... i'm very interested to hear from sebastian and others who
are advocating for AP in the EU context what your experiences
and needs are and how we could promote that conversation in the
right way
sl0071: there are some people
from the US so I'll give a short intor about what is happening
in the EU
... the european parliament is planning a big package of law
called the digital services act
... some regulation to social media and platforms
... the most important thing is the compulsory
interoperability
... the platforms must be interoperable to a certain level so
data can flow between platforms
... the feelings is germany and france are leading this and
advocating for it
... I talked to two members of the EU parliament which is
patrick briar, who is a good person to approach, the other is
karen (??) who is actively promoting interop
... in general it feels like germany and france are leading,
but on the other hand some countries are protecting monopolies,
the D9 group, the group with low taxes for google etc. Finalnd,
Sweden, Poland, Ireland, Luxembourg
... the main problem is I don't have any idea how the civil
society can engage with the EU
... the whole compulsory interop law is discussed within the EU
in foru different boards
... these boards have 919 amendments and modifcation
endorsements
... there is nothing technically
... and it's only 2 days old
... the EU has not met with anything from the w3c or anything
engaged in open protocols
... the EU has yet already met with the messagner vendors like
whatsapp and google and other monolpolies
... that is handled by ietf
... which wants end to end encrypted messaging layer, that is
where google and twitter and whatsapp and firefox are working
together
... I have absolutely no idea now that interop will become a
law how we can get a lobby in brussels how we can get in
contact with them
... the decision in next weeks will be what protocol will be
chosen to be recommended for interop
... I want approach Dr Sylvia Gruntman who is a real expert,
but is the head of internet of council of europe so not
directly nvolved in legislation
... The other thing is the open tech fund became paused and
that was much money for the open free and secure internet
... and I'd like to talk about the funding situation
... I think the most important thing is that we don't have any
application which is conformant to AP, major player
... I don't know how to deal with it if mastodon continues only
to support the type Note so discovery and interop is really a
major concern
... So: how can we get al obby, how can we get funding, and how
can we get interop amongst ourselves
cwebber2: one things..
... Right now there's an actionalble step within the EU
context, but this is also happening within a global
context
... there's a lot of pressure in many countries and attention
on the power structure of social networks over society
... in the US major social media execs are being pulled in to
talk about the ways they've had influence
... Centralisation creates a using game for these
instituions
... in that what you end up with is context collapse
... different people have different requirements for moderation
between communities, but with twitter and facebook etc you have
an omni context
... and these companies are forced to make one decision, set a
global policy
... decentraliation helps quite a bit here
<cwebber2> rhiaro: cwebber2 is in an irc channel with treora; treora has been working on some policy stuff in brussels, we might want to loop him into this conversation?
<cwebber2> rhiaro: he might know something I'll ping him
sl0071: I'm concerned about
people in the community getting burnout
... it's important that we get more shoulders than we have
now
... Another thing is I was criticised today about language in
announcements about the socialcg is too technical and
exclusive
... we don't have to talk about it now, but at some point, it
is hard to think to address someone who doesn't know anything
and just wants to engage
... My primary concern is if we get many people using AP we
should make very clear what an AP cnformant servcie would be.
Does it have to support all tpyes? Seems nobody cares what it
says now
... That's what I tried to say with my talk at apconf
... we should support the whole of the protoocl but we should
weigh it by design. Of course there will be specialised and
diverse clients but they shouldn't lose information
... if they get an Article they should not lose it or destroy
it
... at least I have ot know how I can send them a thing and we
don't hav ea discovery things.. so mastodon says to me in
advance that they only support Note, etc
... These are the things on my mind
cwebber2: To respond to sebastian
- a number of good points
... how to get voices in so our language is less technical?
Getting that kind of criticism is a positive sign
... when you start out you have a bunch of people who nobody is
paying attention to just worried about getting the tech
working
... then you reach enough critical mass that people are worried
about being excluded
... we've hit a point where i'ts not just talking about how we
can build it, but the reality we're living in
... we do need to get more voices
... but it's a compliment that we've got far enough along that
it's not just nerds talking about sending data across the wire,
but about building communities
... what are the next steps?
<cwebber2> https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01f38f966
cwebber2: we have seen positive
examples of people talking about things in a non techical
way
... we want to pull those people in
... see this talk at apconf
... morgan said it was the best intro to AP, and it was about
community issues
... we do have people in the community thinking about this - we
should identify them and reach out
... It's a good opportunity. Maybe we should reach out to derek
explicitly or other people like derek
... On top of that - framing what we actually do
... If we were going to at this moment say we're going to give
some principles for the EU to adopt right now as a
recommednation or requirement, what would it be?
... The first one is we need to ahve open standards that
services are implementing
... It has to be an open standard that federates. The key thing
is there are multiple instances, providing the thing, that can
talking to each other
... a non-example of thsi would be Signal
... it's technically an open standard but only that Whisper
Systems can implement
... The third thing is there has to be at least one major open
implementation, but I think it should be at least two
... that are interoperable
... if a major company has a proprietary implementation that
they don't expose, we might not prefer it but it's not the end
of the world if there are open options available
... One thing that may be surprising - I don't think we should
mandate AP but we might give it as a recmmendaton
... If we'd done this in 2005 we'd be saying everything needs
to be xmpp
... what's in AP now is probaby, if AP survives long term, I
expect AP to shift in how it is deployed and implemented
... we should leave room for those kinds of shifts to
happen
... what I'm more concerned about is that those former
principles be upheld
... I think the last thing that is critical, goes beyond
recommending implementations
... the biggest problem I have and emotionally have difficulty
listening ot any of the hearings, is that everyone coming in is
from the perspective that this is all about only big
players
... they might say multiple providers, if twitter and facebook
can talk to each other that's compliant. That's not what we
want
... a lot of the languag,e despite a lot of good intents behind
it, a lot of the language assumes that it's for big players,
and didn't have the assumption that there would be self
hosting
... we have to make sure that when this stuff is written it's
written with the expectation that self hosting will
happen
... the considerations there are different than from a major
provider
... and self hosting can heal some of the problems with big
providers
... we're at risk of creating a regulatory moat
... that is supposed to stop the big players from being bad,
but means only the big players can participate
... those are the key points from my perspective
<cwebber2> ack cjslep[m]
cjslep[m]: The types of people we
want to get involved - we want to reach out to more non tech
side
... and to add on the technical side with gofed at least,
individuals over the past 2-3 years have reached out to offer
help
... I've been by far the only major contributor to gofed and
the lack of funding and lack of ease of obtaining open source
funding definitely was a challenge to get other people
motivated to help contribute
... people see the value but then see the barrier and time and
effort it can take to implement an AP thing, it's not an easy
specification, they get very easily discouraged
... not saying money is a solution but it's a help to rely on
peoples' long term investment of time and energy
... otherwise smaller protocols tend to get favoured
... I find value in ngi0 and its grants, it's very
accessible
... I' look forward to writing my first grant proposal along
those lines
sl0071: I support what cj
said
... I have the same impression
... in another situation I applied 11 times for funding at
mozilla at the open tech fund and at ngi 3 times.. not blaming
anyone that I didn't get funding but my impression is it's
because everybody thinks if you did war photography for 30
years of yor life and are well known
... and you did things for all of your life which you can't
talk about because they were investigative
... then you lose all of your camears in the ocean and have no
money
... and decide to step 100% in the AP world because you see the
need for pan european media to do their own thing and become
independant from facebook
... the problem is i didn't get any funding at all and I'm in
the lucky situation in germany and get money from the
state
... the problem is I'm working full time 10-14 hours a day on a
thing and I feel unfree
... because my state things that I'm a n00b who does nthing and
give 400 euros for food
... but the fact is I'm doing a lot for my state and I want it
to be considered work, I'm doing work the whole day
... it's not only me, it's all of my journalism friends
(freelance) in the time of the pandemic
... the thing is who I blame is the EU because they put
millions and millions in the horizon programs to support
monopolies
... but compared to this so little to really important things
like ngi0
cwebber2: these are two topics
that involve the state and regulators from two different
perspectives
... one of them is the state doing things to help its citizens
by having them have platforms on which they can communicate and
be safe
... that's the goal of the regulatory action, to try to
encourage decentralised protocls
... the second one is the health of the community is often
built on top of an economic system that isn't really built with
the expetation in general that these kinds of free-rider
problems
... sebastian and cj are trying to do this.. ngi0 is one of the
orgs that is actually doing something about this
... I'm also in a psition of privilege that I've benefited from
that
... What is sounds like this is tying into is there a way in
addition ot the first set of things - the principles to make
sure there's a non-monopolistic community supporting approach
to communicatin on the internet
... the second one is how do we make sure the community is
healthy by keeping the pepole who are building things for the
community healthy
... ngi0 is doing work in that regard
... underfunded per what you'd prefer
... a quesiton would be what could be done?
... While talking to regulators say we can make the situation
better for our citizens by accomplishing this former thing -
open protocols etc - but some of the work needs to be doine by
people who aren't supported by our economic system
... so you can support people like cj and sebastian who are
working o nincredible projects
... I suspect that joost you have the most perspective than
this..
joost: I agree with the
fundamental issue that the maintainers and developers of
architecture everyone is relying on are usually the most
underpaid people
... one of the main reasons we like to shift focus from these
grants we manage from putting it into startups and proprietary
or limited lifespan ideas, into the architecture and
infrastructure that is being maintained by people on a
voluntary basis
... we try to do that.. a percentage of th funding should go to
these efforts
... I think the first.. two points, the first point is a very
solid one to make
... which I always kind of try to feel out whether political
stakeholders are interested in this
... that we rely on major institutions, governments, etc, rely
on US based proprietary infra to even get their point across,
to engage with citizens.
... the most publicly paid institution is entirely
governened/managed/hosted by 2 or 3 companies
... I think in this discussion, sebastian and christopher
already mentioend horizon europe
... which is being worked on
... the budget has been allocated, 100 billion or
something
... will be initialised jan 1st next year
... that perspective of taking back a level of independance for
very fundamental comms and community infrastructure
... which should be promoted as functional, working, vibrant
community, and not just the only standard to rely on
... that is a very valid and important perspective to bring
across
... that this type of alternative for twitter and facebook, I
agree with gdpr and these interop discussions, in the end
there's a very strange thing going on
... a thought prison going on where everyone is criticising
twitter and facebook but feel that there is nothing beyond
those options
... which is a completely strange idea
... the idea is then that everything else outside of those
options must not be usable by 'normal' people
... I did not have a lot of technical expertise, still working
on that, moving beyond the geek/developer only space to a space
where people can explain it without using any of the lingo,
that is an important time to wherever possible show members of
parliament that there is already an alternative
... already something of a interoperable community based on
open standards that is very much alive and thriving
... and showing in actuality that there is a possibility for a
community owned and run infrascturcture
... that would be the most important point
... you could go with the popular hype words of saying there's
no 'fake news' on mastodon, can imagine that you might run a
risk of the discussion being pulled in that direction, the echo
chamber idea
... there is something in there
... something to be said that twitter and fb are fundamentally
made to instigate sensationalism and extremism. They wll say
it's not but that is to attract as many eyeballs
... outrageous voices to attract... I think I'm ranting
... the conclusion here is that activitypub has a very solid
footing right now and very solid position to show that there is
already something bubbling in europe that the political people
are not seeing
<Zakim> cwebber, you wanted to talk about actions and timeline and to talk about blah blah blah
cwebber2: we're coming close to
the hour.. I'm willing to go longer
... I want to move to what we want to do next
... how quickly is this legislation going to come up?
sl0071: it doesn't matter how
quick this will go, react as far as possible
... I asked patrick briar if he wants to be a guest for 15
minutes, if that is what we want
... patrick briar siad to me that the group around him is very
aware that activitypub needs additional funding if it becomes a
law and he will help us
cwebber2: we have more than a
week to get our act together
... I'd be willing to do another meeting about this next week
same time
... looks like joost is saying the same
<cwebber2> +1 meet next week
<sl0071> +1
<pukkamustard> +1 meet next week
cwebber2: can I get +1s?
... I'm going to invite other people
... if you can think of anyone else
... we can look for a different time for other participants as
well
... it sounds like agree on a followup meeting
... the last thing I want to get in - everyone roughly agrees
on the framing that we put out earlier in this call about how
to be able to go about it
... if you feel like that's not the case you should jump up
now
<cwebber2> ack cjslep[m]
cjslep[m]: I have two very quick
things
... joost mentioned that the whole twitter hatespeech idea
might not be one to bring up - you may be curious that in the
fediverse land there was a case where a far right extremeist
group gab joined and eventually left because 99% of the
communities on the fediverse wound up blocking them. It was an
instant way th ecommunity self-healed
... an example to keep in your pocket
sl0071: I wanted to say the same
as cj - it's very important that there is not much money
involved in fb and twitter for moderation. what they're doing
is an algorithm to block a page without any discussion about
anything
... it is exactly what cj said with gab - the AP community
self-healed, humans which did this not algorithms, at facebook
these are algorithms which make the loudest even louder instead
of equalling the voices
<cwebber2> ack cjslep[m]
<Zakim> cjslep[m], you wanted to talk about quick gut feel about FEP
cjslep[m]: a quick gut feel about the Fediverse Enhancement Process - if you've had chacen to look and like it do a +1
<cwebber2> +1
<sl0071> +1 FEP
cwebber2: when I looked it looked
nice, but I'd like to look more
... let's wrap up - I want the last word to go to joost
... you're institutionally in the best position to have
thoughts about what to do going forward
<sl0071> feeling that “FEP” should be an additional meeting to talk about
joost: involving my colleague
michiel into this, he has a long background and connections in
dealing with the EC from the political and administrative
ends
... we should involve him in the next meeting
... some thoughts on how to bring all of these voices together
into something actoinable
cwebber2: let's follow up on a
thread, we'll talk about the next meeting time and about the
people we want to pull in
... I"ll message mike, derek and jessica
... if you mentioned someoene else, volunteer to step up and
reach out
... This might have been the most productive long term social
cg meeting ever
... if we play our cards right there could be a lot of long
term positive impact out of this
... Thanks everyone!
This is scribe.perl Revision of Date Check for newer version at http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2002/scribe/ Guessing input format: Irssi_ISO8601_Log_Text_Format (score 0.97) Succeeded: s/two/one/ Default Present: sl007, joost, rhiaro, cwebber2, pukkamustard, cj Present: sl007 joost rhiaro cwebber2 pukkamustard cj Found Scribe: rhiaro Found ScribeNick: rhiaro WARNING: No "Topic:" lines found. WARNING: No date found! Assuming today. (Hint: Specify the W3C IRC log URL, and the date will be determined from that.) Or specify the date like this: <dbooth> Date: 12 Sep 2002 People with action items: WARNING: No "Topic: ..." lines found! Resulting HTML may have an empty (invalid) <ol>...</ol>. Explanation: "Topic: ..." lines are used to indicate the start of new discussion topics or agenda items, such as: <dbooth> Topic: Review of Amy's report WARNING: IRC log location not specified! (You can ignore this warning if you do not want the generated minutes to contain a link to the original IRC log.)[End of scribe.perl diagnostic output]