W3C

– DRAFT –
Social Web Incubator CG

07 May 2021

Attendees

Present
bengo, dmitriz, present
Regrets
-
Chair
bengo
Scribe
bengo, dmitriz

Meeting minutes

reminder - SW CG meeting in 49 mins

meeting starting at https://bbb.w3c.social/b/rhi-vp1-fv6-vn7

bengo: ok, let's start this off

<Grishka> +present

dmitriz: <intro>

grishka: Hi. Am interested in giving Social Media back to people

bengo: next topic: let's revisit the Saturday alternating meeting time
… the current time (7am PDT) is a bit early.
… So I was wondering if we could do like, a ranked choice voting on the Saturday time slot. Any objections?

grishka: no objections, later would be better

bengo: ok, let's do a ranked choice vote on the time slots (Sunday also available)

sl007: hey, Sunday would be even better

<bengo> https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/proposal-rank-choice-meeting-times-for-the-weekend-socialcg-meeting/1713

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/2021-05-07-socialcg-meeting/1697/2?u=bengo

grishka: that FEP has to do with confirming whether an item already exists in the collection before adding it
… I'd like to hear people's opinions on whether that's already needed, or just me

bengo: Send an Accept to a Follow if you want to, but you don’t have to

bengo: Do you feel blocked on implementing something?

grishka: It’s not Accept, it’s Add. Because you’re proposing to Add something to the Collection.

grishka: I’m thinking about updating the FEP with this requirement of the Add activity

bengo: Yes, update the FEP and notify us of changes

grishka: someone says it’s excessive to require the Add activity

<dmitriz> bengo: since the spec says SHOULD instead of MUST, seems like you're fine

bengo: What about your other use case of querying remote collection for containment

grishka: I need to read more

Dmitriz: Paging/sorting was not done well in LDP-PAGING.

dmitriz: It’s very under-specified.

dmitriz: That said, LDP did have a long discussion on adding an item only if it doesn’t exist

dmitriz: The initial proposal was to using If-Not-Modified HTTP headers

dmitriz: It was complicated for some implementations to normalize/canonicalize the items of the collection to understand if an item was present, and what the If-Not-Modfiied HTTP header value should be

dmitriz: The discussion was inconclusive.

bengo: Is that the approach you’d tak enow?

dmitriz: Not sure. Need to think about it

<dmitriz> bengo: one thing that's on my mind a lot is, with AP, should we even use HTTP headers? (vs stuff everything into the request body?)

<dmitriz> ... given that AP lends itself well to non-HTTP transports (websockets etc).

<dmitriz> ... so I'd be hesitant to use a header like If-Not-Modified

“HTTP Signatures” is mentioned only twice in AP TR

and not with normative languages

grishka: HTTP Signatures are used in more implementations. And are easier to implement and universally understood

grishka: For example, Pleroma doesn’t support JSON-LD at all. Only relies on HTTP Signatures

dmitriz: Funny thing is that HTTP Signatures is seeing more activity at IETF, and they’re in process of changing it

bengo: Linked Data Signatures WG forming https://w3c.github.io/lds-wg-charter/explainer.html#usage

grishka: There is a 2-year old topic about these signatures

grishka: I have implemented Linked Data Signatures with unit tests

Grishka: Now I’m not touching them

sl007: In the last meeting we talked about finding out whether the impl would support Accept/Follow

<sl007> code examples https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/2021-05-01-fediverse-interest-group-meeting/1649/24

sl007: If you would have a think like Follow, for instance, you could be able o say which actions are supported for which groups of people

sl007: For example, is someone allowed to post a ‘Wall Post’.

sl007: So ‘as:Public’ would advertise that anyone can post to the Wall

sl007: Another example ‘partyCheckin’ saying who could Arrive and who could Leave

sl007: Specify which activity type, which object type, and which actors

grishka: It should be specified who can add something to a collection

grishka: Owner of a Collection should be able to do anything with it

bengo: This reminds me of Web ACLs in Solid

dmitriz: In general I think ActivityPub needs better Authorization/ACL specs applied to it

dmitriz: Can we map the existing solid-style ACL to this type of operation? I’m not sure

dmitriz: I’m campaigning to get Solid to adopt AP-style Follow. But we haven’t gotten to Access Control

sl007: The main reason this is useful. I want to know from an AP implementation: “Do you support groups"

sl007: or “Which actions do you support?"

sl007: e.g. if I invite someone to a group, in my implementation a group invite can result in an Accept/Reject. But in Mastodon it requires something else.

bengo: Have you implemented this?

sl007: Not yet, but we’re just starting to talk

bengo: I encourage you to either implement it or author an FEP for others to implement

Dmitriz: Someone describe OMI

dmitriz: OMI is “Open Metaverse Interoperability” group. https://github.com/omigroup/OMI

dmitriz: They want to standardize some of their social/identitiy protocols, and maybe adopt some social web existing work

sl007: I should translate my sketch to an FEP or implementation

sl007: My question is: Any opinions on what we should specify via Link relations

sl007: for example rel=“Inbox” link rel header to the AP inbox

sl007: In the HTML markup, should we specify that a link relation is an ActivityPub actor vs somethinge else

<dmitriz> (side note - welcome to paul & tim from the OMI community, to the call)

bengo: use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_negotiation

Sl007: Do any other implementations use friend of a friend link relations?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

dmitriz: Let’s talk about the issue trackers

dmitriz: bengo had brought up “Is there a single issue tracker for the SocialCG?”

<dmitriz> consensus: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/social-cg-issue-trackers/1648

dmitriz: Result seems to be these links

dmitriz: There’s a swing issue tracker, there’s an ActivityPub-specific one, there’s an ActivityStreams2 one

dmitriz: There are also Fediverse Enhancement Proposals mechanism

https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-rfcs

<Loqi> [hyperledger] aries-rfcs: Hyperledger Aries is infrastructure for blockchain-rooted, peer-to-peer interactions

<dmitriz> bengo: I like how the Aries RFC process is structured

<dmitriz> ... might be worth looking at, for us, re the FEP process

<dmitriz> ... while we might not be able to update the Activity Pub spec, we can do a lot through FEPs/RFCs

grishka: IETF requires that two implementations interop with each other

dmitriz: Yes, w3dc

humbletim: What is redaktor?

sl007: It’s my activitypub-compliant CMS

https://github.com/redaktor

humbletim: OMI is many different meta verse process collectively becoming aware that there’s an opportunity/need to collaborate

humbletim: It’s still formative, but that’s how I’m engaging with it

humbletim: ActivityPub is one of the things I’ve been looking at

humbletim: immerse.space has been using it as a thing for inter-world communications

humbletim: I’ve been trying to prove out some interop. But I’m not sure what to do next with it.

Dmitriz: Great question

Dmitriz: Good news is there’s a spec to use. Bad news is it’s kind of vague. Do you have access to source code?

humbletim: Yes, it is open source.

humbletim: https://github.com/immers-space/activitypub-express

humbletim: https://github.com/immers-space/immers-app

<dmitriz> and http://immers.space/

<Loqi> [immers-space] immers-app: Deploy your own immer, the federated social media server for the metaverse

sl007: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/2021-05-01-fediverse-interest-group-meeting/1649/24

<dmitriz> (that's a nice AP-express lib!)

humbletim: I’d like my POC to use a mongodb database. I’ve adapted it to use a pure JavaScript mogo emulation layer. I want to get it to be turnkey for people to play with, make interop easy

<dmitriz> everybody, go vote for your preference for alternate week SocialCG calls: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/proposal-rank-choice-meeting-times-for-the-weekend-socialcg-meeting/1713

https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG#Meetings

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 131 (Sat Apr 24 15:23:43 2021 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/[someone]/IETF/

Maybe present: grishka, humbletim, sl007