Notices by Christopher Schmidt (crschmidt@better.boston)

@PaterSnape @jefftk @tw @cshabsin I don't really know what you mean here?

Specifically, what I mean is "95% of the servers making these requests are Mastodon servers, so this is largely a Mastodon problem." My understanding is Mastodon is also the home to the overwhelming majority of the Fediverse _users_ (even though it's only bare majority of _servers_). My wording choice was poor, but I don't have anyone intentionally blocked?

@cshabsin Don't worry! I just confirmed that Mastodon doesn't respect robots.txt for any of these fetches, so even if it's added to robots.txt, it will have no effect!

@jefftk @tw @cshabsin yeah, the prone to abuse and "hard to standardize across all implementations" are the reasons it was rejected in 2017, and has languished as an untouched feature request since 2020 (respectively). Time to rethink that. (I don't love that a single implementation is 95% of the fediverse, but it is; standardization is frankly secondary to making sure the core implementation works well.

Over the years, I made a handful of maps of various things in Cambridge; I have collected some, but not all of them, on this page about housing things in Cambridge.

This includes things like maps of where you could legally build a fourplex (short answer: not many places!); the distribution of tax paid per parcel (Kendall Square pays a lot!) and more.

https://crschmidt.net/housing/cambridge/

#Projects #CambMA #Cambridge #Housing

Fun fact: sharing this link on Mastodon caused my server to serve 112,772,802 bytes of data, in 430 requests, over the 60 seconds after I posted it (>7 r/s). Not because humans wanted them, but because of the LinkFetchWorker, which kicks off 1-60 seconds after Mastodon indexes a post (and possibly before it's ever seen by a human).

Every Mastodon instance fetches and stores their own local copy of my 750kb preview image.

(I was inspired by to look by @jwz's post: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294.)

@mattl Because I have already found that I am following enough people that I am having arguments I don't need to have in comments of people who are wrong on the internet. I don't need to do more of that.

@evan @msokolov @gregprice So, an ActivityPub implementation which receives a Note which has an activitystream:replies object should have all the information it needs to fetch replies; Mastodon's implementation in particular chooses not to include reply _data_, using URLs instead, which makes filling that data in downstream costly (ie, requires fetch of each Note object), but that's an implementation detail that could be changed and still fit within ActivityPub/ActivityStreams.

@evan @msokolov @gregprice Thanks.

So it looks to me like:
- ActivityPub delivers a Note.
- That Note can contain various ActivityStream properties, including "replies" (https://activitystrea.ms/registry/specs/activity-streams-replies/)
- The replies object then references a follow-up URL (in mastodon, e.g. https://tech.intersects.art/users/xor/statuses/109396652219164049/replies?only_other_accounts=true&page=true) which then returns (in Mastodon) a CollectionPage to list replies (which Mastodon does with URLs, rather than objects, but the spec allows either.)

There's a lot of things that I am adjusting to as far as interacting with Mastodon content goes, but "Unless you were following someone before they posted, it is likely that the replies to their post are an incomplete view and you have to click through to their instance to see the real replies, which you otherwise DO NOT KNOW ARE THERE" is ... not great.

@gregprice Yeah. ActivityPub Replies are sent upstream to the original poster, who then has a responsibility to federate them back out, but they only federate at that time; it's a little more complicated (e.g. if the replier is on your instance or followed by someone on your instance you'll probably _also_ see it), but some will just never make it to you, and ActivityPub (afaik) doesn't have a mechanism to say "Give me this post and all its replies".

@msokolov @gregprice I am not an expert (so perhaps @evan will hop in and correct me), but my understanding of ActivityPub so far is there is effectively no "fetch" mechanism at the post level at all.

ActivityPub (Server to Server) is a "push" protocol, with the only "fetch" operation being "a list of things directly posted by an Actor" (ie, account); there's no per-post fetch endpoint at all.

Comparing to email: I can email you, you can fetch my _sent_ box, but threads are not available.

@drq @evan @bradfitz Also, LiveJournal added support for cross-server federation of post content (via RSS) in 2002. It added a standardized feed of your social graph in 2004. It created a system for distributed identity (Yadis, later OpenID) in 2005, to allow users to engage on other servers without having to create new accounts.

Yes, it didn't specifically use a spec collection that launched in 2011. Because it lacked a time machine :p

https://news.livejournal.com/58000.html // https://lj-dev.livejournal.com/683939.html

@drq @evan @bradfitz I... feel like there's a timeline problem here.

LiveJournal was launched in 1999. Wordpress in 2003.

Atom, one of the earlier protocols on which OStatus was built, was _created_ by a collaboration between a number of the players of the day in 2003... including LiveJournal.