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   Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 08:44:24 JST Emelia 👸🏻

   In something that may surprise a whole bunch of people, the notion of an "instance" is something of a lie.

   Instances don't technically exist: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#server-to-server-interactions

   #fediverse #activitypub

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 08:44:22 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @thisismissem true

   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 08:44:23 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     It's just a side effect of everything having addresses via id and url properties, and the Host header in HTTP, as far as I can tell.

     The notion of an "Instance" isn't one that's actually codified in the ActivityPub specs. Instead you just have Actors, and the "domain" of an actor is simply the hostname of the actor's id or url (iirc)

     It's only things like Webfinger and HTTP Signatures that bring forward this notion of an "instance" being a "domain" into existence

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 08:50:39 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @thisismissem I'd say `sharedInbox` would be just the teensiest hint of the instance as an entity.

     clacke likes this.
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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 08:56:17 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @thisismissem I'd say the whole thing is a Service.

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     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 08:56:18 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan yeah, I'd argue that we should probably formally define an "instance" or "server" within the context of ActivityPub, and that'd be an Organisation or Group Actor?

     And then it'd identify it's "instance actor" as a Service or Application?

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 09:34:45 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @thisismissem It's not a lie, it's that ActivityPub spec is *not* the entire spec of the Fediverse.
     Just like how HTML isn't the entire spec of the web.
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 09:48:28 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • anna
     @navi @thisismissem Nah, the reason is pretty much that ActivityPub is a W3C standard, so pipe dreams first, implementation concerns much later so it was always seen as a guide even with ActivityPub in mind right from the start.
     And the annoying interoperability parts are very rarely ActivityPub compliance issues and more often problems like "What the hell is this format, please be more reasonable" because ActivityPub barely defines behavior (as seen by the lack of MUST and SHOULD nearly everywhere).
     clacke likes this.
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     anna (navi@social.vlhl.dev)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 09:48:30 JST anna

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     @lanodan @thisismissem
     
     activitypub is also not really implemented properly by any major software (except maybe gts if you count that as major)
     
     afaik it's mostly because most software were developed before the current spec, and never adapted fully
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 09:50:35 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @thisismissem WebFinger quite hints at instances being a thing as there's yet to be any WebFinger aggregator/proxy.
     
     Nodeinfo is more the one that forces the existence of instances.
   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 09:50:36 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan right, but even then you follow through the other related specs the notion of an "instance" there isn't exactly a thing. You're doing a webfinger to the host that's the domain in the handle, but that resolves to something near analogous to an Actor.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 11:26:40 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @thisismissem That's a very good question!

   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 11:26:41 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan I guess it depends exactly how you look at it, for a community, is it really a Service? i.e., are we defining the software or the community?

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:12:50 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • clacke
     • anna
     @clacke @thisismissem @navi It's not referenced in ActivityPub (which isn't The One Standard), but it's an entirely covered possibility.
     https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#retrieving-objects
     > Servers MAY require authorization as specified in B.1 Authentication and Authorization, and may additionally implement their own authorization rules.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:12:51 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • anna

     @navi GTS enforces Authorized Fetch by default, which is not covered by the standard. Nobody is compliant. =)

     @lanodan @thisismissem

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:19:54 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • clacke
     • anna
     @clacke @navi @thisismissem In fact you could maybe even put it as covered given that section B.1 is effectively just a link to https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/ActivityPub/Authentication_Authorization which refers to HTTP Signatures among others.
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:44:42 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • clacke
     • anna
     @thisismissem @clacke @navi
     And that situation is very frequent in ActivityPub.
     
     > Which is why a spec profile is SO important
     
     Yeah, wouldn't disagree there but it's a *lot* of work, specially in implementations where it's haphazardly put together, like the transmogrifier in Pleroma, which is slowly getting deprecated in favor of a proper pipeline+validator.
     By the way https://litepub.social/ was such a profile to describe a non-LinkedData profile of ActivityPub plus few other things but it never really went past WIP/Draft stage.
   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:44:44 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • clacke
     • anna

     @lanodan @clacke @navi that's a MAY reference to a non-normative section. So basically a "idk 🤷🏻♀️ you do you"

     Which is why a spec profile is SO important

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     LisPi (lispi314@udongein.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:54:49 JST LisPi

     in reply to

     • Erin 💽
     @erincandescent @thisismissem As far as I'm concerned that still unnecessarily ties it into low-latency networking assumptions.
     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽 (erincandescent@queer.af)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:54:50 JST Erin 💽

     in reply to

     @thisismissem n.b.3 i'm kinda sad we ended up with HTTP Signatures instead of something better, I wanted to do something with OAuth2 which I still think would have been cleaner in practice

   • Embed this notice
     Erin 💽 (erincandescent@queer.af)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:54:52 JST Erin 💽

     in reply to

     @thisismissem Truth, the only notion that the core protocol has of "instances" is in origin checking of received messages

     (basically: don't trust a message authenticated as https://example.com/@user to contain valid contents for any posts outside of scope of https://example.com/)

     (n.b.2. this is also why you can't take "your" keys with you; having per-user keys is also a lie, and kinda pointless, and we could probably simplify the protocol if we didn't have them)

   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:54:53 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     There's maybe also the note here that the origin server remembers that "block" and then if new requests originating from Actors on that domain come in, it just silently drops them.

     For User Domain Blocks, even in the case of "DM's" or mentioned-only posts, the post still gets created in mastodon, but the thing that doesn't get created is the notification that the post exists.

   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:54:54 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     When you block a domain globally for a server, what's actually happening is that your instance:
     • stops sending new activity's to that domain
     • sends out Undo Follow activities for each follower that was Accept'ed from actors on that domain, and
     • sends Reject Follow activities for any pending follow requests from actors on that domain

     That's it. That's what happens.

     There's debate about whether a Delete Actor activity should also be sent out.

   • Embed this notice
     Emelia 👸🏻 (thisismissem@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:55:01 JST Emelia 👸🏻

     in reply to

     • Erin 💽
     • Jon

     @jdp23 @erincandescent right, exactly Jon, so at protocol level they "don't exist", basically my argument that I'm trying to get to is that maybe, just maybe, given the structure of today's Fediverse, a notion of "instances" or "servers" _should_ exist?

     clacke likes this.
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     Jon (jdp23@blahaj.zone)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 12:55:02 JST Jon

     in reply to

     • Erin 💽

     @erincandescent@queer.af Great perspective -- and great thread @thisismissem@hachyderm.io.
     
     That said, I look at it somewhat differently. Instances most definitely exist, it's just that they exist in spite of the AP protocol mostly not acknowledging them.

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     Rimu (rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 13:50:54 JST Rimu

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan @thisismissem Threadverse instances (lemmy, kbin, piefed) return an Application actor if you GET their root. e.g. attached screenshot.

     Mastodon does not. Maybe it should!

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     Rimu (rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Thursday, 28-Dec-2023 14:43:08 JST Rimu

     in reply to

     The Application is a fully fledged actor, even with it's own public key so it could sign activities it sends, theoretically. I've not seen that happen in the wild, tho.

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     Erin 💽 (erincandescent@queer.af)'s status on Saturday, 30-Dec-2023 08:18:36 JST Erin 💽

     in reply to

     • Bonfire
     • small circle 🕊 in calmness
     • Jon

     @smallcircles @jdp23 @thisismissem @bonfire I think the thing to remember is that without protocol evolution so radical it almost ceases to be ActivityPub, instances will continue to exist

     So building better community structures and reifying the protocol-level structural entities that exist are both important things to do

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     small circle 🕊 in calmness (smallcircles@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 30-Dec-2023 08:18:38 JST small circle 🕊 in calmness

     in reply to

     • Bonfire
     • Erin 💽
     • Jon

     @jdp23 @erincandescent @thisismissem

     Guess it depends where the general focus is in the developer community wrt protocol evolution. If the general trend is "it should work with Mastodon installed base", things likely will go much slower.

     More devs willing to tread new grounds, explore new app types, build libraries, plug holes and take time to bring this to docs + specs, may speed things up quite a bit.

     PS. I like @bonfire with federated groups, circles and boundaries: https://bonfirenetworks.org

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     Jon (jdp23@blahaj.zone)'s status on Saturday, 30-Dec-2023 08:18:40 JST Jon

     in reply to

     • small circle 🕊 in calmness
     • Erin 💽

     I agree that communities are a useful concept and that it's very unfortunate that instances are the only community-like mechanism in Mastodon (etc). But I also think that instances are distinct from both cross-instance communities and instance-local communities. For one thing, local-only posts are currently the only enforceable way of limiting post visibility and I don't see that changing any time soon.
     
     @smallcircles@social.coop @thisismissem@hachyderm.io @erincandescent@queer.af

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     small circle 🕊 in calmness (smallcircles@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 30-Dec-2023 08:18:41 JST small circle 🕊 in calmness

     in reply to

     • Erin 💽
     • Jon

     @thisismissem @jdp23 @erincandescent

     Instances/servers are this more technical and non-intuitive concept. If we talk about inter-connected communities, why not model Community as an AP extension? In 2021 in context of Federated Groups discussion I advocated for a "Community has no boundaries" paradigm, that is more in line to community as we experience it offline. Recently brought it as a #FediverseIdea: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fediverse-ideas/issues/47

     And nothe there's also Unbound Group FEP: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/2100/fep-2100.md