@silverpill @mariusor wait, but that relay you're describing - that's an auxiliary service

@silverpill @mariusor what about cross-instance (opt in) Search? That kind of does need to be an external service, no?

@cheeaun Thanks! So what would be closer to the right solution? @thisismissem @phanpy

@thisismissem @phanpy Oh cool, what's the change?

Hey does anyone know of an ActivityPub client (with at least minimal Mastodon compatibility) that can be used for testing stuff on localhost? I've tried: Elk, Whalebird, and @phanpy, but for whatever reason they don't allow non-HTTPS localhost, so my `http://localhost:3000` local servers are out of luck, for development testing.

(And, I know I can use Ngrok or Dyndns to reverse proxy, but it's silly to need to pay just to test something locally (the free Ngrok domains don't work, btw)).

@thisismissem I really do think AP could support did:web (and its successor, did:tdw). That was part of the motivation behind FEP-e3e9: Actor-Relative URLs https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/e3e9/fep-e3e9.md (basically, to provide a path for upgrade to DIDs). What's a DID? 1) Keys, and 2) service endpoints. For 1, there is https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/521a/fep-521a.md For 2, FEP-e3e9 and https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/9091/fep-9091.md show examples of how to do it. Taken together, they essentially turn an Actor into a did:web.

@jenniferplusplus
2. even more importantly, maybe adopting a process similar to what https://tc39.es does for JS might be even better for Fedi than a breaking 2.0 spec?

That's the route we're trying to take here with this proposed governance doc: https://github.com/swicg/potential-charters/pull/4

The idea being, we can explicitly state and clarify how _each feature_ of a potential 2.0 spec would make its way from FEPs/blog posts etc to CG to WG and into its own spec.
Would that address any of your concerns?

@jenniferplusplus I hear you. And I'm frustrated too (by the pace of change, both how slow specs creation is in general, and also how slow implementation/rollout can be once the spec is ready).
I think part of the reason I'm not campaigning (harder) for AP 2.0 is:

1. From listening to what people want out of 2.0, 99% of it seems to be not AP itself but _adjacent_ specs (portable identity, access control, affordances for moderation, etc etc). So I personally'd love to focus on those first.

and

@jenniferplusplus Understood, thank you.

@jenniferplusplus hey, understood, i can totally see how this comes across as trying to convince. and, deep apologies. i /am/ trying to understand, couple of things 1) why does it feel that things like TFs are sucking the air out of the room? (given that you're there, and see that it's just devs collaborating) and 2) where would you prefer that this work be done, instead?

@jenniferplusplus I think 'efforts blessed by big standards org' implies a lot more gravitas than what actually happens. Again, taking the Forum TF as example - it was just a bunch of devs wanting to coordinate their implementations, they asked the CG to come do it in a task force, CG was delighted. Happened several times. Why is this 'soaking up attention'? Or, where else would you rather devs meet to collab? If there are better venues, I wanna be there too!

@jenniferplusplus Why distract, though? Can't we all work on all this stuff in parallel? For example, one of the task forces is the Threaded Discussions and Forums Task Force -- it's basically a bunch of implementers from forum and Reddit-like platforms trying to hammer out ways of interoperating. I don't disagree with you that ActivityPub has deep problems and needs work. But like..

@jenniferplusplus re
> except activitypub and the w3c are now actively standing in the way, and sucking up all the oxygen for organizing that

So, I'm partly involved in activitypub and w3c stuff, so of course I'm very curious to hear more - what are some of the ways it's standing in the way? I mean, best as I can tell (being involved in it), the social web cg is just trying to provide some github repos, and some (monthly) calls for devs to coordinate, share pain points, start task forces..

@julian @evan Copy that, will do.