Notices by Steve Bate (steve@social.technoetic.com), page 2

@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.

@pfefferle Just to confirm, the WordPress /api/v1/instance/peers endpoint is implemented by a different plugin than the AP plugin, right? Which plugin typically implements that? TIA

@silverpill AFAIK, AP doesn’t define any type-specific Update side-effects (actor vs non-actor).

For standard AS2 actor types, neither inbox nor outbox are needed for detection. For inferring AP actor extension types, I think the FEP should be conformant with the AP spec.

@silverpill @naturzukunft @julian @evanprodromou I agree “transient” not clear at all. The
errata you’re referring to is for C2S Partial Updates (Section 6.3.1) rather than anonymous objects, right?

@silverpill @mariusor I believe that removing the Actor type from the AS2 specification was a mistake (especially after looking at the rationale behind it).

That said, I'm not sure that "core type" is a meaningful label.

@silverpill You allow a missing outbox in your FEP although it's required by AP. I think inbox should also be optional. For S2S, if a server has a sharedInbox, the actor-specific inbox endpoint is not very useful. A shared inbox endpoint plus activity/object targeting properties is enough. For duck typing, an "Actor" is a thing that performs an Activity: it's the object (in an RDF sense) of some Activity `actor` relationship.

@silverpill @naturzukunft @julian The AP spec conflates the "anonymous object" and "transient object" concepts. To be precise, an anon object explicitly has a JSON `null` for an id rather than not having an id property at all. (In JSON-LD, it's the same thing, but.... AP should primarily be interpreted as JSON, per @evanprodromou). I've seen very few anonymous objects in the wild (given that definition).

The "Social Web" (#ActivityPub) Foundation's support from Meta and their links to Meta and X are even more dubious after Zuck's policy announcement. I think they should remove the links (and the associated accounts).

'A place of joy': why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03784-6

@cwebber Thanks for the response. Both the original paper and Wikipedia state: "Everything is an actor". Not in AP. In response to messages, actors can create other actors and only modify their own *internal* state. Not specified in AP. Another difference is that AP actors can communicate to other actors without actor addresses (using "as:Public"). Interestingly, an "inbox" (or message queue) is not required in the Actor Model of Computation (see paper). Too many differences to list here...