Notices by Renaud Chaput (renchap@oisaur.com)

@linos We discussed "partial quotes" when working on quote posts, and decided not to explore this because you could easily change the text of what you are quoting to make it misleading but still attributed to the original author. Also it would probably have been good to have this discussion when we asked for comments, now we are deep into implementation and did not get much feedback when asked for it :(

@smallcircles @andypiper @silverpill @liaizon @bonfire @evan @peertube

@tchambers This does not have anything to do with an FEP as it does not touch ActivityPub. Software implementors can already do that, but as I explained above it adds a lot of complexity.

For Mastodon, I think this will be a multi-month effort touching a lot of the codebase to allow this. It can be done, but not a priority right now.

@silverpill

@tchambers Yes, on-demand loading could be done here, but this is quite complex. It will be an asynchronous backend operation that might take multiple minutes (or never finish because the remote server cant be reached), and you will need to have proper UX around this in the client. We are slowly moving towards having some asyncronous background loading in Mastodon, but this adds yet another layer of complexity to everything.

@silverpill

@tchambers And then you would still have all of those accounts (and their data) in your DB, so now you need to refresh them periodically to ensure their data is up-to-date. Or you need to garbage-collect what is in your database to avoid it growing forever with "useless” data (a real problem already, this will make it worse), but this adds again a lot more complexity.

@silverpill

@tchambers For anything to be displayed in your Mastodon client, your server must have loaded it. So yes, the problem I describe it still here.

@silverpill

@tchambers It may solve one issue (ensuring the follow is valid), but you still need to fetch all the follower’s account into your instance, which may be a lot of them. Then would you fetch those user's own followers, recursively?
You would end up with million of accounts stored (database, profile picture, banner, pinned posts & their media…) on every Fediverse server.

@dansup I want to point out that adding a provider_info endpoint does not make this an FASP.

There is a specification to respect regarding registration, and you need to publish a capability specification that complies with everything.

It would be best if you not call this an FASP before it is really compatible.

@grishka

@tchambers We got the news that we were part of this batch yesterday evening, so that’s very fresh.

Expect the first of those features to appear in nightly releases this summer!

@samvie

@tchambers The description covers what we intend to build with this grant. We do not have any details to share yet, one of the very nice things about NGI Zero funds is that you can apply (and get selected) without having to write extensive specifications.

What are you interested in knowing in particular?

@samvie

@tchambers As I explained, I am not sure this can be fixed due to how AP works

@kfdm building something like that for the Fediverse is on our todolist, but I am not focusing on it because I know it will cause an outrage about Mastodon wanting to centralize everything and capture all users or something of the sort. For many very vocal people there, it’s better to have a very bad user experience than something imperfect but which works

@tchambers @timbray @trwnh

@j12t I don’t think so because you need to have RPs list all IdP they support. That work with a few big actors, not the Fediverse.

Custom protocols handlers are probably a better solution, like fedi:// and the browser asks you what you want to open it with

@dale_price if it seems simple and it’s not done, usually there is more complexity.

See https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/31101 for an attempt and more context.

We would like to fix it otherwise, by having the authoring software mark a link as being a link to a specific AP object so when displaying the status you can know it right away and do what is correct.

@tchambers

@tchambers very clear list and agreee on all of them. I hope most of those will be fixed on Mastodon by the end of the year (at least that’s the plan).

#3 is still one that I don’t have many doable ideas on how to fix properly 😞

I will be at the NGI Forum in Brussels next week!

On Thursday I will participate in the NGI Impact Stories panel to explain how @ngi is helping Mastodon, and on Friday on a another panel to discuss tech sovereignty and what can bring in Europe with @openwebsearcheu

You can still register to attend online: https://ngi.eu/ngi-forum25/

If you also attend, please come say hi! I will have some Mastodon stickers to distribute and will be happy to discuss anything Mastodon / Fediverse related

#ngiforum

@jensimmons I would love to have a major browser start making progress on supporting custom protocol handlers (or any alternative solution) that could make it smooth for Fediverse users to interact cross-instances.
For example opening fedi://front-end.social/@jensimmons and have the browser direct me to your profile on my instance.
That will probably require work with the W3c and we can help, but having implementors with us is really needed

@anildash let’s talk? 👍

@HistoPol Mastodon 4.4 only support creating quote posts that are created by other software.

You can not yet quote other posts from Mastodon, this will come later in the summer.

@ikuturso @paul

@Sarahp Target for 4.4.0 is end of month (or first week of July).

4.5 is "when we finished fully implementing quote posts", which I hope will be September or October at the latest.

@Gargron

@paul We bump the version as soon as the previous version gets a Release Candidate, so mastodon.social displayed a 4.4 version since last October.

Ingesting remote quote posts is behind an experimental flag that has not yet been enabled on mastodon.social, but it should be very soon.

@HistoPol @Gargron