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Liaizon Wakest

I just finished reading this massive thread about standardizing “groups” on the #fediverse and how we want them to work in the future: socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

:fediverse:

The thread is a massive discussion between @humanetech @dansup @sl007 @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex

I tagged them here in case others who do not partake in the socialhub forum have followup questions or concerns regarding the shaping of the fediverse, as this is a participatory space!

16 Sep 2021 at 16:30 | Open on social.wake.st
26 comments
Liaizon Wakest

@yala I loved your participation in this thread and how far out of “tech” you brought the discussion. I think we need more of that in the standardization process to remind ourself we are building the fabric for future inter-human interaction

16 Sep 2021 at 17:16 | Open on social.wake.st
Liaizon Wakest

I was mainly posting about this thread here to encourage more people to go read it because I think there are many important lessons to be had in reading between the lines there. Tagging recent AFK human I have had discussion with about these issues: @notplants @cryptix @cblgh @powersource @adz @manyver_se

16 Sep 2021 at 17:21 | Open on social.wake.st
André Staltz

@liaizon I opened and skimmed it, but I would need a TL;DR because the thread seems focused on AP technical details that make it hard to abstract and see common problems and common patterns with other decentral communities

19 Sep 2021 at 12:57 | Open on mastodon.social
orx

@liaizon

@humanetech @dansup @sl007 @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex

I have 2 groups (forums) on Hubzilla with mostly AP people. As in new Hubzilla 6.2 the posting to group via AP Direct message started to work I am going to announce it and then it depends how anybody would like to use it. AP people can try to make groups on Hz and see if it does what they expect because from theoretical developer discussion it is hard to understand. I like it and to say something one has to experience how the communication situations look on different sides and it takes some time.

@liaizon

@humanetech @dansup @sl007 @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex

I have 2 groups (forums) on Hubzilla with mostly AP people. As in new Hubzilla 6.2 the posting to group via AP Direct message started to work I am going to announce it and then it depends how anybody would like to use it. AP people can try to make groups on Hz and see if it does what they expect because from theoretical developer discussion it is hard to understand. I like it and to say something one has...

17 Sep 2021 at 12:40 | Open on sunbeam.city
Liaizon Wakest

@orx just noticed this message now :( somehow missed it lol. I haven’t used Hubzilla groups at all I guess I should go experience that for myself. What instance are you using lately?

22 Sep 2021 at 13:05 | Open on social.wake.st
oRx-Qx pirateradio
@˗ˏˋ wakest ˎˊ˗ #^https://node9.org is my main hub. Reg should work, when I see u there I can put u into member class, so no need to worry about low channel and storage limits.
22 Sep 2021 at 15:24 | Open on node9.org
creek

@liaizon the tension between "make everything public, for safety" and "let me have private groups, for safety" is wild. Is there a solution?

17 Sep 2021 at 20:52 | Open on mspsocial.net
Liaizon Wakest

@humanetech @dansup @sl007 @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex

ten months later and these discussions largely stalled out. @vpzom did make a post outlining how they implemented some of the ideas discussed into #Lotide and many discussions have come out of this discussion so all and all not a bad outcome but still I really hoped there might be a bit more agreement on how to move forward with #fediverse group #standardization in the last year

5 Jul 2022 at 20:41 | Open on social.wake.st
Sebastian Lasse

@liaizon @humanetech @dansup @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex @vpzom

well, the monthly ActivityPub meeting of today lasted a bit longer than 3 hours and was supernice.
Minutes here: socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

The mentioned thread was “We are adding federated Group support to Pixelfed! Going to be reaching out to a few projects to see if we can make our implementations compatible.”

Unfortunately none of us was probably amongst the “few projects” so of course it did not lead to anything.
Apart from the proposal above, the `Groups` are slightly more difficult and were subject of the meetings May and June.
The meetings are in the W3C Cal on socialhub and Social CG webcal.

We hope we also come up with a concrete proposal for Groups as well after holidays, hopefully this Fedi Ontology redaktor.github.io/vocab/index
(from github.com/redaktor/vocab) will be ready then.

Best would be if anyone attends, next meeting (always 2nd TUE except holidays) is August 9th prior to fedi.camp

@liaizon @humanetech @dansup @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex @vpzom

well, the monthly ActivityPub meeting of today lasted a bit longer than 3 hours and was supernice.
Minutes here: socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

5 Jul 2022 at 21:10 | Open on digitalcourage.social
Liaizon Wakest

@sl007 speaking of fedi.camp, are you going? I am planning on going!

5 Jul 2022 at 21:20 | Open on social.wake.st
Liaizon Wakest

@sl007 oh and I see the meeting happened today! I need to add these to my calendar as I have been meaning to attend for ages now but am very bad with scheduling

5 Jul 2022 at 21:25 | Open on social.wake.st
Sebastian Lasse

@liaizon

Yay. At least see you there.
Steffen had asked yesterday in the matrix group re. remote participation and then I'll also put a Call for Participation on the socialhub (see meeting minutes)
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

PS: Are you in the guppe group?
It is a.gup.pe/u/fedicamp
Anyone: If you follow via mastodon ui, the cache is pretty old (for the.old server), so for all guppe groups note that it is “@a.guppe” …

@liaizon

Yay. At least see you there.
Steffen had asked yesterday in the matrix group re. remote participation and then I'll also put a Call for Participation on the socialhub (see meeting minutes)
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/

6 Jul 2022 at 5:40 | Open on digitalcourage.social
Григорий Клюшников

Sebastian, groups are a fully completely solved problem at this point.

5 Jul 2022 at 22:35
Liaizon Wakest

@grishka @sl007 the standardization is not yet solved though and thats the harder part

5 Jul 2022 at 22:38 | Open on social.wake.st
Григорий Клюшников

˗ˏˋ wakest ˎˊ˗, my approach is to start with the UX and work my way down from there. I can never let the UX be driven by the underlying layers — users won't care about that. They'll see that things are wonky. They won't care that the underlying protocol is technically beautiful but restrictive in practice in ways that leak into the UX.

Pixelfed groups *should* be compatible with Smithereen, at least that's what @dansup@mastodon.social told me. I've never had the chance to test them myself.

5 Jul 2022 at 22:43
Michael Vogel
@dansup @grishka How does this group implementation work in detail? Can Smithereen host groups? I really would like to test Friendica's group implementation against otrher implementations.
6 Jul 2022 at 5:55 | Open on pirati.ca
Sebastian Lasse
Григорий Клюшников

Michael, Smithereen groups aren't like Friendica groups from what I gather. Yes, of course Smithereen can host groups. The idea with Smithereen groups is that they're completely separate entities from your profile. You post straight into a group and your followers have no idea.

In short, for basic functionality to work:
- The actor must be of type "Group" or "Organization"
- It must implement a wall according to FEP-400e (https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/feps/fep-400e.md), also see https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen/blob/master/FEDERATION.md

Group invitations are Invite{Group} activities, sent both to the recipient and to the group actor. You accept an invitation by simply joining the group (Join{Group} or Follow{Group}). You decline it by sending Reject{Invite{Group}} to the group actor. For now, one can only send group invitations to their friends (mutual follows). A group itself, via its admins, can cancel a pending invitation anytime by sending Undo{Invite{Group}} to the invitee.

Closed/private groups are much more complex. There are "actor tokens" and all that stuff I gotta document in detail sometime later, probably in that FEDERATION.md file.

For a group to show up as an event, it needs to have an Event object in its "attachment" field, preferably with start and end time. Oh and then there's also tentative membership... It's optional.

Michael, Smithereen groups aren't like Friendica groups from what I gather. Yes, of course Smithereen can host groups. The idea with Smithereen groups is that they're completely separate entities from your profile. You post straight into a group and your followers have no idea.

In short, for basic functionality to work:
- The actor must be of type "Group" or "Organization"
- It must implement a wall according to FEP-400e (https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/feps/fep-400e.md), also see

6 Jul 2022 at 11:23
Sebastian Lasse
Sebastian Lasse

@grishka

Tried to look it up.
Can't find an official extension in the W3C docs.
The last adopted is as:alsoKnownAs –
Is there anything written about it?

It is strange because 30 people talked about it together in May and June (groups by topics, relay groups, groups with roles and permissions, the “Describing Potential Actions” thing which was already diiscussed before AS2 etc.)
Also about Controlled Vocabularies for the context field.
Everyone has very different requirements for Groups, defining permissions and capabilities.

@liaizon

@grishka

Tried to look it up.
Can't find an official extension in the W3C docs.
The last adopted is as:alsoKnownAs –
Is there anything written about it?

It is strange because 30 people talked about it together in May and June (groups by topics, relay groups, groups with roles and permissions, the “Describing Potential Actions” thing which was already diiscussed before AS2 etc.)
Also about Controlled Vocabularies for the context field.
Everyone has very different requirements for Groups, defining permissions...

6 Jul 2022 at 5:46 | Open on digitalcourage.social
Григорий Клюшников

Sebastian, yes, because I spent that time actually writing real code instead of endlessly discussing theoretical all-encompassing specifications and never settling on anything. I wrote that code and it works — that's what matters. I will eventually document it.

6 Jul 2022 at 14:13
Григорий Клюшников

˗ˏˋ wakest ˎˊ˗, discussion is stalled because it wasn't producing any concrete results. It was endlessly going back and forth between various "what if"s. Smithereen has fully working federated groups and events now. Closed (approval-required) and private (invite-only) groups too. And group invitations. At some point I simply realized that a) it's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission and b) federation between instances running same software is more important than between instances running different software. Yes, I did add several extensions to ActivityPub — including collection querying. No, these are not yet documented. Yes I will document them at some point.

˗ˏˋ wakest ˎˊ˗, discussion is stalled because it wasn't producing any concrete results. It was endlessly going back and forth between various "what if"s. Smithereen has fully working federated groups and events now. Closed (approval-required) and private (invite-only) groups too. And group invitations. At some point I simply realized that a) it's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission and b) federation between instances running same software is more important than between...

5 Jul 2022 at 22:33
django

@grishka looking forward to seeing these docs, we're planning on adding groups to wordpress in the coming weeks!

6 Jul 2022 at 17:51 | Open on social.coop
smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@liaizon @dansup @sl007 @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex @vpzom

> ten months later and these discussions largely stalled out.

There's more than 2.5 years of discussion thus far, without much resolution *as-yet*. With Groups being just one feature to get community consensus and standardization on, this paints a bleak picture on seeing fedi reach its full potential.

I kept some notes on this whole Group discussion you may find useful. See: notes.smallcircles.work/cp38nG

@liaizon @dansup @sl007 @mike @heluecht @grishka @nightpool @tchambers @yala @weex @vpzom

> ten months later and these discussions largely stalled out.

There's more than 2.5 years of discussion thus far, without much resolution *as-yet*. With Groups being just one feature to get community consensus and standardization on, this paints a bleak picture on seeing fedi reach its full potential.

6 Jul 2022 at 5:53 | Open on mastodon.social
mike
It does appear that there is some consolidation in the group space. Pixelfed and Mastodon both seem to be converging on the Smithereen implementation, and that's one of the implementations we support. Another handful of projects are converging on "just use mentions" and we support that as well (but only for public groups). We're probably going to see some issues about cross-platform leakage of private group content because we can't agree on whether privacy is an attribute of a post or of a conversation (with the same polarised debate as surrounds tabs vs. spaces or vi vs. emacs or AGPL vs. MIT). But this was always going to be a problem.

Anyway, consolidating into two competing camps is much better than where we began.
It does appear that there is some consolidation in the group space. Pixelfed and Mastodon both seem to be converging on the Smithereen implementation, and that's one of the implementations we support. Another handful of projects are converging on "just use mentions" and we support that as well (but only for public groups). We're probably going to see some issues about cross-platform leakage of private group content because we can't agree on whether privacy is an attribute of a post or of a conversation...
6 Jul 2022 at 3:38 | Open on unfediverse.com
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