With respect to #ActivityPub

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

LitePub was mostly a rejection of LD-signatures and started with an outspoken Pleroma developer. The spec itself was basically an incomplete rant that contained very little specification. By reading it, you had no idea what it actually did or how.

Which is OK, we've all rejected LD-signatures now and we've got an alternative (object proofs built on elliptic curve cryptography and a fairly simple data normaliser). The only thing you need to be careful with are floats (used by location-aware ActivityPub services). A few of the normalisers have issues with these.

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

@mikedev Thank you for the history lesson! The LitePub website has just enough information in it to let me pour all of my hopes and dreams into it, with no pesky details to burst the illusion

Mike P

@benpate @mikedev That's not unusual in this space, though

Irenes (many)

@hrefna we would be very happy to join such a working group

Irenes (many)

@hrefna we'd like to propose just making a coalition of the willing without any overarching organization, and then having meetings and longform discussions in the way that a standards body does

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

@jenniferplusplus @hrefna Yes to this.

If we *have* to break compatibility, fine, let’s go. But hopefully we can provided a smooth migration path so we’re not rebuilding the whole network from scratch.

The existing AP network (flaws and all) is incredibly valuable -- especially for microscopic projects like mine because it solves the “empty party” problem. If I can connect into an existing network, my app is instantly more valuable.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@ireneista @hrefna

Just FYI. Elsewhere on the thread I mentioned that I can facilitate such working group, under umbrella of Social Coding movement, but otherwise retaining full independence to set own course.

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/113471719114615033

Even if only to discuss things upfront to explore the opportunities, it can be very useful to use the forum and maybe other tools available.

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

Hey #Fedidevs -- I've tried to collect the areas where we could improve #ActivityPub and #Fediverse development, including as many points from this thread as I could find. Take a look and tell me how close I am to the mark?

https://benpate.dev/improving-activitypub

This is me begging for feedback, so don't be shy, but do be kind

@puppygirlhornypost2 @sebinthestars @hrefna @jenniferplusplus @lily

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

I’ve listed seven core topics:

1. Strict mode
2. Rich Interactions in the Inbox
3. ActivityPub Intents
4. HTTP signatures
5. Reply Collections
6. Account Portability
7. Client API

I think we could make mostly-backward-compatible changes in these area, and go a long way towards turning the Fediverse into a single, cohesive ecosystem.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @sebinthestars @hrefna @jenniferplusplus @lily

lily

@benpate @puppygirlhornypost2 @jenniferplusplus @hrefna @sebinthestars i think you summarised a lot of the big pain points of activitypub pretty well, but i do want to mention that i don't think lookup validation is a good replacement for http signatures, because if we were to solely rely on it as a verification method, it could be abused by malicious instances to make the network ddos a certain instance (or any website for that matter, but that is already happening and doesn't seem to have a lot of impact on static sites) which could be bad for smaller instances running on low-spec hardware

other than a couple typos here and there i think your summary is pretty good overall though

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

@lily @puppygirlhornypost2 @jenniferplusplus @hrefna @sebinthestars

Yeah, I’ve gone back and forth on “lookup validation” and I’m happy to be corrected.

It seems to me that it doesn’t open up any additional attack vectors that don’t already exist, but it does drastically reduce the overhead required to send/receive messages.

Low-spec servers may need to improve their caching tools, but I think it’s probably a net win for efficiency.

(And sorry for the typos)

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I have something that's sort of protocol related. The lack of rate limit headers for activitypub implementations... I know that's not really defined or governed by the protocol... but it's just stupid how we send thousands of http requests at once, and how we only back off when we hit the rate limit. I have talked about this, using rate limit headers would allow for instances to send a steady stream of requests without overloading the remote instance, saving time. We use exponential backoffs which... if the server is rate limiting me for 10 minutes but my jobs failed so now my instance is going to wait 8 hours to send jobs... it's so fucking stupid. i hate it. bothers me so much

lily

@benpate @puppygirlhornypost2 @jenniferplusplus @hrefna @sebinthestars yeah now that i think about it the issues with the approach could be mitigated with a cache duration during which it doesn't fetch a new version. although that could become an issue with edits
or there could be an spf-like verification step to make sure the request can only come from the originating server

kopper [according to whom?] :colon_three:

@benpate @hrefna @jenniferplusplus @sebinthestars @puppygirlhornypost2 @lily

in both object-based signature cases and what you call lookup validation, how do i end up implementing the same access control (theoratically per-actor, practically per-instance) http signature can give me?

Hrefna (DHC)

@puppygirlhornypost2

It _can_ be specified by the protocol, however, it's just not. Some other protocols do this and there's no reason so long as we're talking more broadly about HTTP headers generally.

@benpate @lily @jenniferplusplus @sebinthestars

Hrefna (DHC)

@kopper

There's no access control inherent HTTP signatures or in how they are generally implemented and using it for that purpose is _very_ hackey.

If we want access controls there are better solutions with things like JWTs.

@benpate @jenniferplusplus @sebinthestars @puppygirlhornypost2 @lily

Amber

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I mean I wish it was standardized. Also, what would be nice is a filtering of certain activities. Not every activity takes the same amount of work (a delete activity vs a create activity for instance, deleting is cheap...). the fact we just sorta throw out a wicked mix of jobs with varying processing times as if they're the same...

kopper [according to whom?] :colon_three:

@hrefna @jenniferplusplus @benpate @sebinthestars @puppygirlhornypost2 @lily

sure, but currently "dropping http signatures with no proposed alternative" leaves me unable to make sure DMs only reach the instances they're supposed to (well, in a best effort basis, anyway). i'd welcome a better alternative but it needs to exist before http sigs can be disregarded