Notices by Steve Bate (steve@social.technoetic.com)

@sun @silverpill Vocata, ActivityPods, rdf-pub, …

@lanodan There’s no public repo yet. It’s WIP. Isn’t Pleroma C2S only supported on the server side?

@silverpill Those workarounds for the undermined extensibility don't negate my point and will not generally interoperate. According to the ActivityPub book, "One point to note is that correctly parsing and interacting with AS2 objects with extended properties requires a JSON-LD-aware parser." I agree this isn't absolutely true (in special cases) but try sending expanded "toot" context term URIs and see how well it works 😉 (since all servers AFAIK expect those terms to be compacted).

To follow up on my #ActivityPub C2S post from a few days ago, I wrote a blog article on my thoughts about improving the C2S protocol and a description of some related experimentation I've been doing.
https://www.stevebate.net/activitypub-client-api-a-way-forward/

Here's an idea. What if we extend #ActivityPub C2S (C2S++?) with a minimal set of features (FEPs) to provide a reasonable (or even excellent) UX? Along with servers that already support C2S, we could write an external protocol adapter from C2S to the Mastodon client API to increase the number of users that could potential use a C2S client. The C2S API would be general, but the UIs could be domain-specific (microblogging, media sharing, long-form, etc.). Who's with me?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eX3fiQLo84

Assuming anybody, besides me, is interested in such a thing, what's the best (or even just good) way to organize such an effort?

@evan Cool. What are the benefits of this compared to the RSS feeds that Mastodon and other servers provide?

@hosford42 @mapache @j12t @tchambers @tommi Moderation is also an issue with email-based "overlay" communities (spam and abusive behavior on mailing lists). The challenges seem roughly similar.

@j12t @tchambers @tommi The ActivityPub network (Fediverse) is often compared to email. I know it's a dubious analogy, at best, but people don't typically pick email servers (or email service providers) based on "community". However, communities still form as an "overlay" social network through mailing lists, newsletters and so on. Why can't an "instance" simply be an ATA (Activity Transfer Agent) and clients be AUAs (Activity User Agents) with the ability for any AUA to work with any ATA?

@silverpill @trwnh @raucao These kinds of discussions fascinate me. "Yeah, it's not right, but what's the problem?" 😉 It reminds me of ...

https://xkcd.com/1172/

@silverpill @trwnh @raucao I don't think this is accurate or helpful. The first sentence of the AP spec: "The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.". Later, "ActivityPub uses ActivityStreams for its vocabulary." AS2 is referenced many times in the spec. It definitely *does* matter in an ActivityPub context.

@silverpill See the AP book for clarification of intent, but the vague wording is “attach” vs “replace”.

@silverpill It could be a non-activity object. Replacing an existing object (vs activity) ID during a C2S Create (implicit or otherwise) is apparently not required (the wording in the spec is a bit vague, of course). See the related “conceptual trickiness” @evanprodromou discusses in his ActivityPub book.

@silverpill Why do think this is an activity ID?

@silverpill The server can dereference the `id`. That object may have properties that support delivery and other useful behaviors.

#ActivityPub trick question. If a C2S client actor identified by “http://bar.example/actor” posts {“id”: “https://foo.example/something”} to its *outbox* server endpoint, is that valid? Why or why not? If the answer is “it depends”, it depends on what?

Scenario: Human Q&A site accumulates large quantity of useful information (Quora, StackOverflow, etc.). AI model ingests that data. Users start relying on AI based Q&A. Original Q&A site dies (no traffic). No more training data. What happens then? 🤷♂️

I don't remember. How long has the W3C SocialCG been trying to form a Working Group to at least correct the errors in #ActivityPub? Has been 6 months, a year, longer?

Just for fun... try this #ActivityPub quiz to test your knowledge of the protocol.

https://apquiz.stevebate.dev/

@silverpill @helge I think the issue is more the view that requests are *processed* by actors (versus a server). Do you know of any place in the specification that states that an actor processes the activities arriving in its inbox?

I believe some of the spec authors are confusing the issue by claiming AP is based on Hewitt’s actor model.