@darius interesting! thanks, we'll dig in when we can

@darius I LOVE the idea of a schema observatory. I’ve done quite a few projects in the past that involve schema registries, and they can be so helpful to a community who cares. This idea of effectively reverse-engineering the current utility of supporting existing federated schemas is awesome.

Here is a video demo of the tool if you just wanna see what it's about in 4 minutes.

@darius always a step ahead, congrats on the launch!

@darius Thanks for doing this work!

@darius what happens when something you can post here will get strikes on other platforms? Some are worse than others but I also think it's a great idea if you can get around actually free speech!

@darius

Seems to me like a cool and potentially very useful thing!

Also, respect for the lovely job done here of explaining it up front before people have a chance to get worried - which "ought to be" common sense, but in practice seems to be remarkably uncommon sense :-)

@darius Seems like you might be over-qualified. Hopefully it won't take long to land a new position that would align with your qualifications. Meanwhile, are you open to checking side gigs?

@darius

a: this is a super valuable tool, very helpful, it's great youre building it!

b: I genuinely do not think the fediverse can exist if we're taking the idea seriously that surfacing activitypub data formats requires an opt-in consent. Taking that idea to its logical conclusion means that its literally impossible to build a federating AP server.

@darius I think this is going to be fundamental as a tool for compatibility between Fediverse software as the network grows. Understanding what is being sent, schema wise, is essential to being able to handle it.

I also wouldn't mind running this as a proxy in front of a server, where I can submit information about activities I receive, but anonymizing everything before forwarding to the collector.

@darius please hand off Hometown to another maintainer! It's cool you're moving on to these new, bigger projects, but it's sadly ironic that those of us who liked your ideas about social media the most — and therefore started Hometown servers — are left stuck without updates or bug fixes.

@darius great tool but the Mastodon developers do not want to comply with other rules for different federations and activity hub standards. Mastodon will only work in Mastodon. It’s the reason why you won’t see misskey post in Mastodon or pixelfed photos, the Mastodon developers deliberately ignore everything outside the Mastodon community.

@darius THIS IS AWESOME!

I'm wondering what happens (i.e. how would you display it)when a software sends an Activity type in two different ways depending on certain factors.

I can't remember the exact example, but I think it was GoToSocial at some point provided *either* an array of URIs or a single URI as a string depending on the number of recipients. That was a tricky one to troubleshoot.

@darius How do you counteract poisoning of the data by bad actors? Do you have a blocklist of peers or addresses to discard data from? Can you remove poisoned anonymized datapoints if they’re discovered long after collection?

Does the relay work with peers who have AUTHORIZED_FETCH turned on? Most relays don’t.

I presume you can’t collect data from Fediverse servers that don’t support relays. I know that Takahē doesn’t, pretty sure it’s still on GoToSocial’s roadmap.

sounds good to me, thanks @darius

@darius I'd love to read the blog post but light text, black background is a massive accessibility problem for a lot of people. If you're able to incorporate some detection of user colour theme requirements into the styles for the project and its documentation that'd be extremely helpful. Thanks.

@darius opposite question!

will a relay explicitly for opting in be available?

some people may not want to join a public relay due to how heavy they are on server load, but may want to provide data to your project nontheless…

@darius nice idea. consider opt in with https://eggplant.place

meanwhile it would be nice to share your code url, host name, and nodeinfo once you are ready to open your service. much as you'd like to research others' schema, other admin/dev may want to know more about yours, by looking into nodeinfo and code.

@darius cool! I didn't dig in too deeply, so maybe you cover this, but a related helpful feature/tool might be knowing which software (libraries, implementations) would be able to parse data/schemas. getting in to https://caniuse.com/ territory, or things like ACID.

also often helpful if folks (eg, devs) can paste in data (JSON) and see how it validates, using the exact code being used to "observe", without that being captured and included in database.

@darius I always presume that anything I post here is public anyway. So in that regard I don't see an issue.

@darius Thank you for asking before launching and for the detail and transparency. Sounds good to me.

@darius I think I support this but the scrolling thing on the side makes it difficult to read the thing

@darius There seems to be an overlap between this and https://funfedi.dev/support_tables/

Perhaps you can contribute to that project? It seems to be privacy-respecting because samples are generated locally

@darius I understand that the observatory is injesting data via a relay. This more or less limits data to public activities, which is fine however I wonder if there would be an alternate method for submitting a schema? Whether by submitting a static file, or by some type of handshake…

@darius

👍⭐🤩 Sounds great !!!

@darius is the idea to post to and read from live ActivityPub servers to analyze whether or not they adhere to specs?

@darius yay! Good luck!!

@darius look at the Nostr. They did it already.

@darius excellent! This kind of data would be super helpful to developers. I thought about standardizing on schema.org ontologies, but measuring actual usage is much better. And kudos for seeking feedback before development.

Overall, I like your privacy priorities. If anyone doesn't trust you to scrub the post data, you could allow them to scrub it on their end, or with a proxy they trust in the middle.

I wonder how well someone could be fingerprinted from the data after it is scrubbed.

@darius
Super dope, love it