What I personally want more than a good test suite in #ActivityPub, and possibly a lower bar, is a good reference implementation.
Specifically, I'd want something that:
Implements all nontrivial requirements of the spec.
Implements a significant percentage of the data vocabulary
Can handle a nontrivial amount of traffic. It doesn't need to be optimized for it, but it can't fall over in a stiff breeze—analysis should be comparable to analysis of a prod system, just at smaller scale
I think in many ways a test suite would be more generally useful, but part of what I personally find challenging is simply determining what it even means to "handle a response."
A reference implementation would solve this.
I know of a few efforts in this regard, but most of them seem to have an iron triangle around the three criteria above:
One or two of the three only. Never all three together.
So far I have developed some heuristics when looking at implementations here.
I'm glad #projectgutenberg made their #fediverse debut in 2023. Having their library announcements/recommendations in my feed is just what I needed especially for 2024.
Great literary suggestions (and books!) that provide an oasis and outlet from the digital noise of today. I would dare say that curling up with a good book is one of life's most satisfying and enjoyable experiences!
I may be the only one but for #fediverse apps I prefer a PWA over a native app. Small teams building apps that don't need direct access to hardware benefit from putting all their energy and resources into one (1) platform.
The sheer number of #Zuckerberg (and others) #quislings in the #Fediverse is going to kill it. Inside of five years #independent, #distributed#SocialMedia will be dead for all practical purposes, and the people holding the daggers covered in its blood will be those who were inside it.
Gestern lief eine Aufstellung der "historischen" Schritte, die zum Entstehen des Fediverse geführt haben, durch meine Timeline. Lest selbst, wie es sich in den letzten 15 Jahren entwickelt hat.
@BrauchC@gnulinux@quincy@crossgolf_rebel Es gibt leider nur noch weniger als eine Hand voll GNU Social Server, auf denen mensch sich anmelden kann. Da bliebe nur noch, selber hosten. War lange auf LoadAverage. Quitter war nur so ein kurzer Hype, weil das eine Twitter-ähnliche Oberfläche hatte. Hypes sind Scheiße, sieht mensch jetzt wieder. Es ist egal, was fürs Netzwerke das sind, ob sie was taugen oder nicht. Mastodon, Bluesky, meta und dann die Kindernetzwerke... Mit 70 darf ich das sagen!
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
@thenexusofprivacy@fediverse@fediversenews Simply blocking Threads won't actually accomplish anything, except leave people stuck on Threads. If we want to actually help people, we need to take active actions beyond boycotts. We need to bleed users off of Threads, and we cannot do that if we block them outright.
404's everywhere, "we're working on it" signs everywhere else.
Like sure, not being able to find my response in the pile of thread sounds like Linux problems, but how is this not loading faster and better than reddit?
So, how is #ActivityPub implementation in #GitLab going? Steadily, if a bit slowly!
In the last four months, we've been working on implementing the first ActivityPub actor, the one allowing to subscribe to projects releases. The ActivityPub part is already written, but there will still be a couple month before it's fully merged. Turns out that the most time consuming part is code review : there is no dedicated team to this (but there is a dedicated developer assisting me, thanks Patrick!), so people reviewing code discover ActivityPub at the time they have to review it (and, by the way, it's incredible how they get out of their way to help a contributor on such a complex subject, they rock). For that reason, we have to make smaller than usual merge requests, splitting the feature as much as possible, and then some again, to make it as easy to understand as possible. And even then it usually takes about a month to get one chunk merged.
Hey #fediverse. Not to brag or anything but #Friendica now has its own versions of #Tiktok and #pixelfed where you can filter just video, just audio or just pictures. A few bugs need to be hammered out with images in the css department but the hard part is all done.
I'm interested in hearing from #ActivityPub developers who've successfully mapped #OpenGraph properties from <meta> tags in Web pages onto the Page type and its properties in AS2.
@evan yes, and it creates a sort of "thundering herd" unintentional ddos for web sites on underpowered providers. there have been ideas on how to solve the trust issue, like randomly verifying some small subset and tracking reputation, or like deferring to a semi-centralized pre-trusted "link preview provider" that is shared between several instances, or even simply ignoring the issue and depending on people to report misleading links. (i prefer the provider approach)
@trwnh another option is accepting the sender-provided metadata to start, and then verifying on a schedule that recognizes that thundering herd problem -- say, a randomized delay between 1 and 300 seconds, with an exponential backoff. And I definitely think having a trusted shared caching server can help immensely.
Confession: I still don't know what boost does here. It must do something bad because so rare do I see on a post "boost(1)" or "boost(anyothernumber)" for that matter. Should I also avoid "boost"? Or does the interface only show when our individual boosts?
