Reminding myself to check in on the fediforum in a week or so.
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d@nny "disc@" mcClanahanreplied to malena / bikes not bombs last edited by
@seachanger @Gargron @kristinHenry currently there is no forum for discussing features of fediverse software outside of the individual codebases for each type of server (mastodon, misskey, gotosocial, etc). this means a proposed feature needs to find a server codebase willing to implement it for them, then individually shop around to other server codebases until it gets enough presence that mastodon dot social is eventually pressured to implement the feature, and it becomes "standard". this allows eugen and (to a lesser extent) other developers to exert a form of soft power by forcing discussions about functionality to be tied to their ideas about implementation complexity.
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Julian Fietkaureplied to d@nny "disc@" mcClanahan last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @Gargron @kristinHenry Please correct me if I'm missing nuance to what you're talking about, but doesn't the FEP process cover what you're requesting? https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep A lot of features that relate to fediverse interoperability get suggested there, sometimes with a demo implementation, but often without. The specification is then discussed and evolved by the community until it's mature enough to be implemented by server software.
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d@nny "disc@" mcClanahanreplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@julian @seachanger @Gargron @kristinHenry i have been looking for something like this, thank you so much
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d@nny "disc@" mcClanahanreplied to d@nny "disc@" mcClanahan last edited by
@julian @seachanger @Gargron @kristinHenry i would love if there was a spec at least so clients can know what to code against (and especially a specific mechanism for indicating optional functionality) and would hope that becomes a goal of this work. i would also like to know how non-programmers might interact with this and/or whether there is a forum for pre-FEP feature discussion
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Kristin (vis.social Admin)replied to d@nny "disc@" mcClanahan last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @Gargron
It's difficult to request specific features, when the problems need more holistic analysis...to step back, acknowledge a problem, and collaborate on ideas for improving safety.Telling people to 'report', is all fine and good when there is just one bad interaction a month, at most. But for folks that are constantly attacked, that just doesn't work at all.
I don't know what specific features to engineer, but I know we need them. Desperately.
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Julian Fietkaureplied to d@nny "disc@" mcClanahan last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry By clients you mean end-user clients or other servers aiming for interoperability? The client world seems to have settled on the Mastodon API, and that one is versioned and should be stable as per Mastodon's docs. Pleroma and some other servers implement it for compatibility with popular Mastodon clients.
There is also an ActivityPub C2S spec but it seems to be virtually unused.
(This'll get kinda long, lmk if anyone wants to be untagged)
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry On the ActivityPub S2S side, it's a bit more complicated. There's the AP spec itself, there is the SocialWG group that works on improvements to it, there are the FEPs that (ideally) conform to the AP spec and document how to implement specific features on top of it, and then there are various server implementations.
I want to say @evan had a post somewhere that summarizes these layers better than I can. I haven't dug deep into the formal processes.
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry Something that's crucial to understand about the FEP process is that anyone can write one, it's not an exclusive club or anything. I once had someone ask me "but how would I get an FEP approved" and I'm like... that's not a thing, that's not how the process works. You just write it down, make it public, iterate it with the community, and if implementers like it they'll add it to their server projects.
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d@nny "disc@" mcClanahanreplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@julian @seachanger @kristinHenry i'm thinking of end-user clients and "settled on mastodon" is not sufficient to address the plurality of fediverse servers and in itself is a huge yet solvable problem imho. not sure why we should tolerate implementation-defined centrality in this regard personally especially when AP demonstrates that a real spec is a more stable foundation to build off of
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry As you point out, that leads to different servers potentially having varied functionalities.
On some level that's an intended feature of the fediverse, that you can just go and do something new without needing anyone's permission, but it also adds uncertainty. I'm not sure if there's any spec for a general server capability query API, if there is I haven't come across it.
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry Generally fedi servers handle this by quietly dropping things they can't understand instead of vomiting error messages at the user. So if you want to build a combined microblogging and audio scrobbling ActivityPub server, you can emit `Listen` objects in between your `Note` objects as you see fit, and your followers on Mastodon will simply not see them, whereas people on compatible servers that have implemented your FEP will.
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry Bottom line, I think hoping for a "one true spec" that covers everything an ActivityPub server might do is not in the cards, not while people are coming up with new functionality all the time. If you want to get into the spec evolution process, I'd probably recommend getting in touch with @evan or the SocialWG in general. I'm a hobbyist with a toy ActivityPub server, I have no opinions on the direction of the spec or the quality of the process.
🧵 fin
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Julian Fietkaureplied to d@nny "disc@" mcClanahan last edited by
@hipsterelectron @seachanger @kristinHenry It's a chicken-and-egg situation. Way back when Mastodon started, Eugen decided to come up with a custom API to go between web frontend and ActivityPub server because it would get done faster than implementing ActivityPub C2S (AFAIK). Then third-party clients started building on that API to be compatible with Mastodon. Then other servers reimplemented it to be compatible with the clients. Now, moving to AP C2S would be a whole-ecosystem paradigm shift.
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Kristin (vis.social Admin) last edited by
@kristinHenry @hipsterelectron @seachanger @Gargron I think what makes it difficult to move this conversation forward is that there are no simple solutions for this problem, or we'd already have them. On the bright side, relevant work is going on in many different places:
* Mastodon 4.3's improved notification filters are in part a reaction to this problem
* @iftas working on a dependable framework for server block coordination: https://connect.iftas.org/library/iftas-documentation/fedicheck/(1/2)
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@kristinHenry @hipsterelectron @seachanger @Gargron
* @thisismissem working on intra- and inter-server moderation tools: https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/113075865207943094
* Fediseer as a tool for instance reputation management - https://fediseer.comCommercial social networks have trained us into a sort of "yell at the air and hope the corpo listens" approach to effecting change, but many of these efforts can be supported through advocacy, volunteer work, or donations, for those in a position to be able to.
(2/2)
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Julian Fietkaureplied to Julian Fietkau last edited by
@kristinHenry @hipsterelectron @seachanger @Gargron @thisismissem Actually I want to expand on that last sentence, so (3/2) I guess:
I am speaking from a very privileged position as someone who (a) has never been harrassed and (b) has spare income to donate. As usual, the people with the most power in the system are the least affected by its problems. That's what I mean by "in a position to": the responsibility is decentralized just like everything else, and we need to take care of one another.