Notices by Steve Bate (steve@social.technoetic.com), page 3

@freemo Is there a technical description somewhere of how #fedipage works? Or is studying the source code the best approach?

@andypiper Overall, it's a very nice video. I just wish the creator hadn't compared the Fediverse to the United States. There's nothing analogous to the US Federal Government in the Fediverse. Since the USA wouldn't function well without the Federal Government (I'm sure opinions will vary), the point isn't clear to me. Said differently, "federated" can have different meanings in different contexts (nations vs software servers) and I think this video conflated multiple meanings of the word.

@andypiper A better analogy might be the international postal system (snail mail) that is federated and is generally effective without central governance.

@dansup Looks interesting. Do you have an estimate of when it will be released?

@mariusor @benpate @dansup

https://social.technoetic.com/users/steve/statuses/111331622962509323

The list is longer than that, but it would need a long form post to cover all of what would be needed to have something similar to the Mastodon UX. This is easy to confirm if you compare the APIs.

It's possible to implement some of those features in a ad hoc way using AS2 data structures, but I believe many UI developers prefer an API that's standardized across server implementations.

@mariusor @jenniferplusplus @benpate I apologize that my response to your replies were hurtful. I actually felt like you were being a little dismissive about the larger issue of C2S deficiencies relative to the Mastodon API (and why C2S is not widely used) and that you were challenging me to defend my position on that issue. Showcasing experiments with C2S UIs would be a great topic for a different discussion thread. (I plan to dig into your implementation further when I have time.)

@mariusor @jenniferplusplus @benpate Yes, I wish it were, but I do believe AP C2S should not under consideration for most UI applications (based on my own experience with it). Because I’d really like it to be more feature-complete, I may respond strongly when someone suggests it’s already good enough. I don’t know what it would take to make it viable for most applications (where “viable” means about the same UX as current popular Mastodon UIs).

@benpate @dansup I believe the primary reason there are no widely-used C2S user-facing clients (vs testing tools) is that the standard C2S API is not sufficient for a decent UX. If you compare the Mastodon client API with the AP C2S API, there's a significant disparity in features.

@blog Yes, it’s a shame that Fedi public keys for HTTP signatures are not publicly accessible in authorized fetch scenarios. That doesn’t make much sense to me. The reason for it (fragment-based key IDs in Mastodon) is obscure and seems arbitrary to me. The fix is relatively easy, but I don’t see much motivation to fix it.

I’m beginning to wonder if the email mental model some people suggest for #ActivityPub is a serious hindrance to understanding the concept of a federated, decentralized social graph.

@trwnh @devnull So ActivityPub is basically just WebMail? ;-) Where does the social graph and applications (far) beyond twitter-like clones fit into this view?

If the #ActivityPub community effort to define problem domain-specific AP interop profiles proceeds past the discussion phase, some initial profile candidates are: microblogging, video sharing, image sharing, audio/music sharing, media review (books, movies, etc.), and event planning. Each of these has existing implementations and represents a specific AP use case. In the longer term, other profiles, like for forge federation, could be added as implementations evolve and mature.

The #ActivityPub sharedinbox is a strange concept. It's an inbox without an actor. I suppose one could think of it as being backed by an implicit, non-conformant (no outbox) actor-ish thing that routes messages to other inboxes. There's no requirement that there's zero or one sharedInbox per server. A server can have any number of them. You could have one per set of actors in a Group or Organization, for example. But then the sharedInbox would an Group/Org actor-specific inbox. 🤯

@helge @godmaire Also… https://github.com/steve-bate/activitypub-testsuite

@smallcircles @evan One of my concerns about the FEP process is that it is actually too tightly coupled to SocialHub for the purpose of FEP discussions. It's natural to comment on an FEP "issue" in the issue tracker. The current approach means the discussion is sometimes fragmented between SocialHub and Codeberg. I think SocialHub is very valuable. I'm just not convinced this is the best way to use it for FEPs.

@smallcircles @evan I've already discussed it on SocialHub. I personally have benefited greatly from seeing W3C and Mastodon discussions about issues in the issue comments (same for many other projects). But that is a tangent. My point is that SocialHub is a required element of the current FEP process. (CORRECTION: SocialHub is not explicitly required. It's just a strongly recommended convention. FEP discussions can officially happen anywhere.)

@smallcircles @evan Ah, thanks. I see now it's not explicitly required by the process meta-FEP. I had a different impression based on related discussions on SocialHub. So the FEP process allows the FEP discussions to happen anywhere: SocialHub, the FEP issue comments, the SocialCG mailing list, Matrix, here, any combination of these, ... good to know. 😉

@smallcircles The data is literally "linked data". Although there are other options for working with distributed linked data than using Linked Data tech, I'm wondering what alternative you have in mind. Many developers use ad hoc implementation-specific techniques to manage it, but it's not clear to me that this is an improvement over LD.

If you're interested in #Threads #ActivityPub posts, here are the existing profiles to follow.
@0xjessel
@btsavage
@christophersu
@mosseri
@rklambo
@sblackst
@shubhankar_91
@tb_99999
@wongmjane

I often see the "Robustness Principle" invoked when discussing ways to improve #ActivityPub interop. There's an IETF draft that discusses the negative consequences of this strategy. Instead, they suggest that "A community that takes an active role in the maintenance of protocols will no longer need to rely on the robustness principle to avoid interoperability issues." Sounds great to me.
https://intarchboard.github.io/draft-protocol-maintenance/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance.html#name-harmful-consequences-of-tol