FediForum hot take

naturzukunft

@evan @julian @pfefferle
Unfortunately, I don't get to develop that much at the moment. But as they say: good things take time
What I do know is that a generic C2S server is hard work. I am very curious to see where my motivation will take me and how long it will last. On the positive side, the motivation has been there for a few years and https://rdf-pub.org is my first real OpenSource project. So the signs are good.

#rdfpub

naturzukunft

@pfefferle @evan @julian
Client developers are very welcome. that's not my focus at all. and it would be very good to have a client developer who has a different perspective. I would start with “Notes” anyway, as this is the easiest to test with other servers.
next steps, however, are stabilization, webfinger feditests, following..., http signature.

naturzukunft

@pfefferle @evan @julian
And I have planned to contact @thisismissem to see if there is any motivation for a phone call regarding Oauth2.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] that's true, I think Mitra might qualify? @[email protected]

Raphael Lullis

@pfefferle @evan @naturzukunft @julian

I've been *dying* to find a way to work on just that: https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-the-what-the-why-the-who/

Any chance the fine folks at Automattic can hire and/or sponsor my work on it?

Evan Prodromou

@raphael @pfefferle @naturzukunft @julian hmm.

silverpill

@julian @pfefferle @evan @evan @pfefferle It's headless but honestly I don't see how that could help. Vendor-specific RESTful APIs won because they are easier to understand and easier to implement. In order to be competitive, standard C2S needs to provide something that can't be achieved with RESTful APIs.

I think the answer is FEP-ae97, which enables rich offline-first clients and data portability.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] long story short, the session participants basically agreed that it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Also looping in @[email protected]

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian @silverpill @pfefferle @evan @dmitri

I was far more interested in the idea of delegating the publishing & distribution of activities to another server from existing AP software

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @pfefferle @dmitri @thisismissem The big advantage is that you can create clients that do interesting things like games, drawing apps, enterprise applications, and you can plug them directly into the social network. You don't have to create a new social network service for every single application type you're making. That's a dumb, old way of thinking, and we have to get over it.

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @pfefferle @dmitri @thisismissem The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).

We'll get there. Most servers already support the read-only aspect of the ActivityPub API pretty well. Implementing the write-only part is actually pretty straightforward. A ratchet process of clients and servers.

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @pfefferle @dmitri @thisismissem The next thing we need is a straightforward OAuth 2.0 profile. I did one as a FEP, but Miss Em thinks it should use a different discovery method, so I think we should maybe move the effort into a TF at the CG.

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @pfefferle @dmitri @thisismissem I used onepage.pub as the sample app in my book, and created a command-line API client called `ap`.

https://github.com/evanp/onepage.pub/
https://github.com/evanp/ap/

julian

@[email protected] that's actually a pretty wild concept... ActivityPub as a Service.

I see dollar signs.

Emelia 👸🏻

@evan @julian @silverpill @pfefferle @dmitri

I'm not the only dissenting voice on that FEP, we should definitely use standardised discovery from the OAuth WG, and the client registration problem can be solved using the internet draft I've co-written with Aaron Parecki.

Evan Prodromou

@julian Yes, absolutely. Plug it into your authentication domain like an LDAP server or a Google Workspace, and away you go.

infinite love ⴳ

@thisismissem @julian @silverpill @pfefferle @evan @dmitri

"delegating the publishing and distribution" is exactly what the AP C2S API does.

Emelia 👸🏻

@evan @julian the only other "problem" here that I can foresee is different applications clobbering each other because they don't understand each other's data or extensions (I think of this as the "solid problem")

Emelia 👸🏻

@trwnh @julian @silverpill @pfefferle @evan @dmitri

I mean like saying to Mastodon, Pixelfed or Peertube "hey, this is my AP actor over here, send C2S activities to it and it'll handle distribution"

infinite love ⴳ

@thisismissem @julian @silverpill @pfefferle @evan @dmitri right, i've oft said that mastodon/pixelfed/peertube/etc are in reality better fit as AP Clients rather than AP Servers (technically, they are monolithic implementations where the S2S bits are subsumed by the transformers/workers/controllers)

having mastodon et al implement AP C2S support against a generic AP server would help solve the chicken-and-egg problem as well as ameliorate a slew of others (portability, etc)