Feedback requested on Fediverse Enhancement Proposals going stale before finalization.
Look who I’m with!
It’s @evan@cosocial.ca, the co-author of #ActivityPub!
He and I had a long conversation about the future of the Fediverse, and upcoming developments!
Here’s the biggest news: @evan@cosocial.ca is actively working on ActivityPub again, specifically the spec! He’s excited about #FEP too!
These next few years for the Fediverse will be great!
Just pushed an extensive update to FEP-fffd (Proxy Objects), which explains the process of merging posts with their proxies and removes the need for extra context entries. This should hopefully be the final syntax for this feature.
in the discussion for fep-5624, the use of `context` to represent a conversation was raised. and the intention was to allow "reply" and "comment" systems to understand each other. but it's possible to reframe the problem entirely. rather than focus on "is this reply-link valid?" we might instead consider, "does the linked object's replies collection contain this object?" or alternatively "is this post part of a conversation/context collection?"
AP has turned a corner. It's standardized and in wide use.
Building extensions on top of AP is useful and necessary, but starting over with incompatible protocols is a bad plan.
Blue Sky in particular is a bad project. It started after AP was standardized. The team had access to many many people's time and all the docs and experience of the fediverse.
But they opted to make a snowflake protocol instead. I think because they want to capture value at the protocol level.
Don't use Blue Sky.
@p I have FediList feature request.
At http://demo.fedilist.com there is a "TOR?" dropdown menu containing "TOR only" and "Exclude TOR" items. Could you add a new category that represents clearnet instances connected to Tor federation? An instance belongs to that category if it has a clearnet domain name AND its peer list (api/v1/instance/peers) contains at least one .onion instance.
This should help people on Tor network make new connections.
In an attempt to apply Hintjens' ideas around problem-focus more broadly, I invited ChatGPT to provide input on my World Problems issue tracker.
https://github.com/weex/Problems/issues/21 is an example.
Feel free to add more or comment.
If you like the idea of voice assistants but it's gotta be open source you've probably heard about MyCroft AI and their Mark II device. Neon is an alternate OS build based on OpenVoiceOS.
I made this video showing some of NeonOS and my experience getting it to do a couple things on the Mark II.
Instagram closed my account and I'm really not sure why. Community guidelines they say but I don't even know what I posted weeks ago. I couldn't find the account when trying to appeal. Maybe I shock-horror mentioned the fedi. Unsure.
Bottom line: Instagram closes accounts without reason or recourse. Good.
🥳 I'm pleased to announce that "FEP-1b12: Group federation" has just been finalized. Find the document at https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/feps/fep-1b12.md
👆 This FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) describes how groups are implemented in existing Activitypub platforms using `Group` actors. This is the fourth standards document to be finalized under the FEP process and continues efforts to help interoperability across the fediverse.
🛖 View other proposals and submit yours at https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep.
#fediverse #fep #standards #activitypub #socialhub
📽️ A big misunderstanding on software quality (from a Pieter Hintjens talk)
The old model of collaboration in the ZeroMQ community was like this. There was a guy who was the main author. He would write code. It would be very clever. A genius man. There was a friend of his who was the main maintainer and he could understand git and branches and merges and packages and makefiles and autoconf and all this very complex stuff and he could talk to the first guy.
Their brains would synchronize with this amazing shared state which involved lots of beer and meetings in strange locations. These two were a very good team. They made amazing software which was very fast and didn't crash. It was amazing and good.
Then there were all these other guys who were using it and contributing to it, but the contributions had to go through a mailing list to one of these two guys here, who would then look at the mailing list patches and say, "Hmm we don't like your patch. We don't agree with your patch. We think your patch is.... We don't like it! You know it's basically our baby so if we don't like it... well we'll think about it. Your code is badly indented. Hmm, no."
Video continues: https://peertube.magicstone.dev/w/4JSGy66bu1THNrmMY2UZjt?start=17m3s
Pieter Hintjens talk at EuroPython 2014 is a must watch. So glad to have found a higher quality version to add to the Magic Stone video library.
What is the internet?
A stack of protocols.
That stack is defined among thousands of RFCs. One of the first (RFC 3) is about writing RFCs.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3.txt
Kind of a fun to read in light of #FEP and #SocialHub.
Been taking notes on videos and books for a while. Figured it was time to start publishing some of them starting with favorites, meaning stuff I'd listen to or read more than once to get the most out of it.
Here's legendary processor designer Jim Keller on Lex Fridman's AI podcast.
New PeerTube instance, new video.
This one about the MyCroft AI Mark 2 hardware and why I wanted to check out an open source digital assistant.
Working on one for Magic Stone but that'll be limited to Hintjens/C4 and Magic Stone-related projects. Would be great to learn of one for personal/variety vlogs.
I'm sad that peertube.co.uk went down. I had rehosted some Hintjens videos there. Any suggestions on a sustainable PeerTube/fedi video hosting platform to move to?
Quickly mentioning the Quoted Posts issue in Ecko.
The link I mention is just https://github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko/issues/477
Here's a quick video about Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.
If you're not familiar with this fediverse-native standards process then hopefully this clarifies some things.
Welcome to the fediverse! I joined in early 2021 and created community-driven forks of Mastodon and diaspora*. I'm also an editor on the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals project.
If you you want to tackle big problems, consider Ecko and Acropolis your forks.
The easiest way to install is through YunoHost (https://yunohost.org). We also support source and docker-based installs.
Feel free to ask questions. Learn more at https://magicstone.dev
Pronouns: he/him, Toots: CC-BY-SA