This is an interesting (pronounced like "frustrating") thread.

Jenniferplusplus

@julian
There are two different levels of problem here. One is that mastodon (for instance) doesn't know what it means to Listen to something (for instance).

The other is that mastodon (for instance) doesn't know what a Song is (for instance).

The theory is that this is fine. You use a client that understands the kind of messages you actually care about. In practice, that sucks and everyone hates it.

julian

@[email protected] I wouldn't go so far as to classify them "failures", just a diminished handling that causes an unintended side effect (everybody sending as:Note)

Also good call about me mixing activities and objects. I knew I messed something up somewhere!

Jenniferplusplus

The theory is that json-ld solves this, too. You pack in some extra data on your messages so that recipients know that Listen:Song is similar to Announce:Song, and Song can be previewed as (blob of html).

Again, in practice, this doesn't work, because processing rdf data is an absolute nightmare. It's incredibly expensive, and a security disaster. So basically no one does it. And even if they did, it's still not magic, and a microblog still won't know what a song is. The experience still sucks.

Sam Sethi :pc2red: ⁂

@jenniferplusplus @julian I think we all want to use the right vocab verbs. I want to use listen, announce, article, buy, follow etc. This will allow me to add a filter to our TrueFans.social activitystream pages e.g http://truefans.social/samsethi - there are multiple ways we can hack this to work but I would prefer to not use Note for everything. We tried to use Summary but Mastodon marked every post with verb Summary as sensitive. So we couldn't use that either.

Noah Kennedy

@jenniferplusplus @julian I really want a replacement for activitypub with a simpler and more implementable set of semantics

AP is too flexible and too hard to semantically interpret, and we get interop issues because of it

Stepping away even from things like blocking where the design of the protocol is fundamentally inconducive to having them be practical for a minute, I want something like AP without the linked json or other W3C-ey bits

Jenniferplusplus

So now there are dozens of disparate kinds of apps trying to become legible to each other, with no way to actually, in practice, accomplish that. No way except to degrade everything to basically unstructured plain text up to roughly tweet length.

Which sucks.

We have this whole massive global scale hyper media infrastructure, and the best we can manage is no better than telegrams.

Emelia 👸🏻

@samsethi @jenniferplusplus @julian arguably, an Actor should be able to follow another Actor and say "these are the activities I'm interested in", such that I can follow your reviews but not your listens.

Jenniferplusplus

But if you say any of this, activitypub evangelists will crawl out of the wood work to berate you for not understanding how open or decentralized or flexible or whatever else the fuck activitypub supposedly is.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus There’s this recurring idea that somehow if we can just make our data formats extensive enough we’ll eventually end up with “the everything format” and we won’t need any other type of data and any app can read any file. I remember XML promising this in the 90s.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)

@jenniferplusplus one time we had someone respond to our issues with activitypub to snitch-tag us in with cwebber and be like "why don't you bring this up with her, she's even trans!!" as if her gender had any bearing on the situation. cwebber blocked us, we ended up blocking the rando

Jenniferplusplus

Standards and specifications are supposed to facilitate interoperability, by pre-doing a bunch of coordination work for future participants. But ActivityPub is this partially defined rdf vocabulary wrapped in a little bit of prose, and nothing more. It completely punts on all of the coordination that standards are supposed to provide

Now we're left to do it ad-hoc, except activitypub and the w3c are now actively standing in the way, and sucking up all the oxygen for organizing that

Which sucks

Sam Sethi :pc2red: ⁂

@thisismissem @jenniferplusplus @julian again 100% agree, otherwise we can end up overloading people who follow us. Filters by verbs in clients is critical. We are testing this now in TrueFans.social so if you want to follow what I publish from TrueFans you can limit what you receive. So in my TrueFans.fm settings I choose what activity verbs I want to publish to my public Activitystream - https://truefans.social/samsethi - but we want to offer you the option to apply a filter so you can choose.

Jenniferplusplus

@atax1a I have a lot of sympathy for most of the people involved with the original process. They had impossible requirements, no time, and no support.

But the end result is that we still have this not-spec that people keep assuming will let them interoperate. Like some open pit that people keep falling into.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus I remember reading an argument for this, which pointed to the newfound success of the web and said “imagine the interoperability of the web but for EVERYTHING” and the site had a “best viewed in Netscape Navigator 3.0” badge on it and I remember thinking “one of these things is not like the other”

Emelia 👸🏻

@samsethi @jenniferplusplus @julian

I think it'd be neat to see a FEP for follow-time activity selection.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)

@jenniferplusplus we're mutuals with one of the other people involved with the original spec, and they've had good humor about our criticism

and also yeah, you've seen us in full-on "yelling about oauth2" mode

Jenniferplusplus

@samsethi @julian
And there are solutions to that. But they take real work and coordination. We should have schemas. We should have a schema registry. We should have defined fallback mechanisms. We should have conformance profiles.

But none of these things exist, and it's killing us.

Jenniferplusplus

@mattly There is something happening that induces some deeply rooted and powerful magical thinking around this concept. But I have not figured out what it is or how to disrupt it.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus I’ve been victim to it once before; I think it’s a thing that happens when one gets too into the abstract realm, and doesn’t do any actual implementing. It’s easy to forget the real world exists and has constraints when you don’t work in it.

hidden

@jenniferplusplus @julian If we'd remove Mastodon from the picture would the problem go away?

If we had 100% compliant ActivityPub app, whatever that means, would it work with another 100% compliant one? Say podcasting app, badge app, events app and blogging app...

The problem seems to be the undefined or open to interpretation protocol...

Overriding AS object to do something else because your app won't use it doesn't help either...