Minutes from 2 May 2024 WG Meeting
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@julian Great work, thank you!
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@julian @dmitri @angus @rimu @evan @pfefferle @thisismissem @trwnh @jupiter_rowland @mikedev @renchap @nutomic I keep missing these! The first one I had something come up that conflicted with it, but this one I must have just forgotten to put on my calendar. Maybe I'll catch the next one.
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@[email protected] Let me add you to the list-of-people-to-mention whenever something is scheduled
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@[email protected] slightly ahead of you there
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18010/adding-forum-task-force-calls-to-the-calendar -
@grishka What are your thoughts on FEP-400e vs FEP-1b12 question? Is there a good reason to pick one over another?
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Our conversation container work is based on and very closely related to fep-400e; and the biggest difference in my view is that it provides a mechanism for supporting protected/restricted audiences. Under fep-1b12 you're very much restricted to everything being public, as third parties need permission to fetch the Announce'd objects and this is very difficult to achieve without having advance knowledge of all the third parties - as bearcap/token based solutions currently have issues with de-duplication of content and correctly assigning contexts. We've currently got a hybrid model in place which theoretically supports both models for public groups/forums, but it's somewhat wasteful in resources. The container/collection model can easily support both.
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infinite love ⴳreplied to Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ on last edited by
@mikedev @silverpill how do you feel about the use of `context` in the exact same way that `target` is used (invalidly according to as2-vocab, i might add)?
my understanding is that conversation containers use the same id for `context` and `target`. this is redundant imo, but i suppose that's where we are currently...
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@[email protected] @[email protected] as an aside, I am led to believe that 1b12 and 400e are incompatible with each other, which would preclude any implementor from simply implementing both?
Could a potential avenue be making changes to 400e so it can coexist with 1b12 — or vice versa — or is that not an option?
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Mike Macgirvin 🖥️replied to infinite love ⴳ on last edited byI don't have any serious reservations. Nobody else is doing anything remotely similar to conversation containers and this provided a solid way to identify them outside other uses for collections in a context (of which there are many; groups/fep-400e, photo albums, lists/circles, event calendars, etc.). The missing piece is something like "this context is being used for purpose 'xyz'". That's not an insolvable problem, but I was trying to do so without adding any new vocabulary terms or tags/attachments of some kind.
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@julian @mikedev As you probably already know, I think the better path forward is to use the actual intended property for this, which is context, and to send out Add to Collection instead of sending Announce. The "incompatibility" is simply in payload, but the consequence is significant if you want to support private forums.
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infinite love ⴳreplied to Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ on last edited by
@mikedev Hmm. I think that the "correct" way is to add new vocabulary terms and multitype the collections, so for example [OrderedCollection, Conversation]. But point taken, there is definitely a lack of signaling what exactly a collection is, what does it include, etc.
At least for the forum use-case I was thinking of two new types, a Topic (Collection of post objects), and a Forum (Collection of Topic). names subject to change of course. the pattern is broadly generic but the terminology isnt
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@silverpill @julian obviously my FEP is superior
The problem with FEP-1b12 is that it just formalizes the fundamentally flawed Announce flow. It's flawed because you have to post to what's essentially *your own personal timeline* to later have the post boosted by the group actor. Because of that, your followers can see the group post, as it technically exists outside of the group.
FEP-400e does not have this shortcoming because you create your posts "into" the group to begin with.
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@mikedev @silverpill actually, Smithereen has private (invite-only) and closed (manual approval + invites) groups, and I do have an authentication/permission mechanism to go on top of FEP-400e, what I called "actor tokens". I have it documented here: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen/blob/master/FEDERATION.md#access-control-in-non-public-groups
Never made it a FEP because I thought that the whole FEP process was dead. Should I make one?
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It sounds the whole discussion about Note vs Page is really asking how to get Mastodon to display your content better. But I think thats entirely the wrong question to ask. When someone complains to me that Lemmy posts look wrong in Mastodon, I simply point him to the Mastodon issue tracker. Its absolutely none of my concern how other projects render our content. There are dozens of Fediverse projects and I dont have time to go around and change things to satisfy every single one. If Mastodon developers dont want to improve things its their loss. Its important not to get blinded by Mastodons large user numbers. It really is by far the largest Fediverse platform so far, but does that really matter? If you look at centralized social media, there are actually billions of users. So a few years of growth and migration waves could catapult any well-designed project ahead of Mastodon in terms of user numbers. Its much more important to optimize for all these potential future users, rather than appease a minority on Mastodon who sticks to such a badly behaved platform. Also what does Evan mean by saying that Page shouldnt be used? Lemmy uses it since day one without any problems, its a perfectly fine type.
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@grishka Looks interesting, I think writing a FEP is a good idea. The process is not dead yet
I want to implement private groups too but it is not clear which approach is better. We discussed private groups with @nutomic and he said that FEP-1b12 can also support private groups. There is an RFC, but AFAIK it has not been implemented yet.
And here's the documentation for @mikedev 's Conversation Containers: https://fediversity.site/help/develop/en/Containers
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@silverpill @nutomic @mikedev @julian
well, the benefit of my implementation of private groups is that it already exists
I'll write a FEP about my actor tokens.
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The container approach works great for private communities because we aren't performing any third party fetches. The relationship is with the group actor, who relays the signed activities within an Add to Collection activity and these can be fetched directly from the group instance by anybody having a relationship with the group actor.
We're using FEP-8b32 (object integrity proofs) for signing these activities because LD-signatures have a number of issues, the most important of which is they have known limitations when nested. So in this case the third party is never fetching the activity from its origin. They have a signed activity delivered to them as the object of the Add activity.
The biggest issue by far with private group posts is the privacy of the original post in the thread. I've been in some heated debates about this. I don't expect anything different now. We revived an old fediverse concept (the bang tag) for privately addressing groups, whether the group is public or private. We also provide post-by-DM for sites that don't support bang tags. Using a bang tag (or DM) to perform an FEP-400e remote post-to-collection has the least user friction. We'll also accept simple @-mentions for public groups for compatibility with the FEP-1b12 mob, but this cannot be used with private groups for hopefully obvious reasons.
In any case, bang tags solve a lot of problems and provides some consistency between public and private groups and folks catch on to them real quick. Especially folks with historical ties to the StatusNet universe. -
@[email protected] said in Minutes from 2 May 2024 WG Meeting:
Also what does Evan mean by saying that Page shouldnt be used? Lemmy uses it since day one without any problems, its a perfectly fine type.
That might've been a simplification on my part. The distinction was between Article, Note, and Page and being displayed in-app with rich HTML support.
Page, as per spec, is better handled how Mastodon already handles it: a short summary with a link to the original page.
Correct me if I'm wrong @[email protected] ?
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J julian referenced this topic on
