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ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

w3.org

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Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#11

Post by paroneayea »

j4pe wrote: post #7

I really like the idea of a social web standard. This seems like a very constricting protocol, though: the one-to-one correspondence between a user and a server means I need to individually post my activity to the "inbox" of everyone who wants to read it (or they poll my "outbox" - I'm not sure). Not a recipe for an efficient system. It's called ActivityPub, so this was clearly a design decision to meet the goal of b…

There's a public delivery mechanism where if many people are on the same server, and its a public post (eg Twitter style messages, etc) it can be delivered to a shared public inbox https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#public-inbox-delivery

That way the receiving server can only get POST'ed to once and distribute to the appropriate followers.

Of course, for more limited distribution posts, you still have to distribute individually, but that's no different than how email works.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#12

Post by HerraBRE »

devrandomguy wrote: post #3

So, about that federated DELETE operation. In a decentralized network, we can't unilaterally delete a shared piece of content; that is one of the main features of decentralization. Even providing that verb seems kind of deceptive to me; it implies that content that enters the network, could conceivably be purged, which will affect how people use the network. Perhaps DISOWN would be a more accurate verb, especially if…

If the social contract says "delete things when you see a delete message", then that's useful in a federated environment.

Only bad actors will disobey and they will have to modify their software in order to do so. This doesn't provide absolute protection against bad actors, but since most bad actors don't own a time machine, it reduces the scope of the harm they can enact.

Consider the adversary "angry ex-boyfriend." Let's assume he wasn't always angry and isn't a sociopath. By the time he has become angry, the sensitive posts have already been deleted. This makes a difference in real life to real people.

There is indeed a user-interface concern, to not over-promise to the end-user. But that doesn't justify leaving such a useful thing out at the protocol level.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#13

Post by cookiecaper »

devrandomguy wrote: post #3

So, about that federated DELETE operation. In a decentralized network, we can't unilaterally delete a shared piece of content; that is one of the main features of decentralization. Even providing that verb seems kind of deceptive to me; it implies that content that enters the network, could conceivably be purged, which will affect how people use the network. Perhaps DISOWN would be a more accurate verb, especially if…

No, I think it's important to retain mutability. Anything you post on the internet now functions the same way; everyone who has viewed it received a copy, and there's no way to ensure that the content is actually gone from everyone's machine; it probably exists in the browser cache of most recipients, etc.

However, I think one of the big things that cryptonerds and other people deeply involved in developing this type of technology overlook is that most people don't want a system that tells them "good luck retracting anything you ever publish". Integrating this as a "feature" is actually an active barrier to adoption.

Yes, it's true that you can't ever guarantee all copies of something have been destroyed after they've disseminated, but you can still provide the facilities necessary to signal that the content owner wants that to happen, and create an expectation that blessed clients will observe that signal internally.

We need to provide mutability at least on par with the current experience if we expect one of these alternate social protocols to pick up steam. These are popping up like flies recently, and most overlook this.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#15

Post by praveenster »

benwerd wrote: post #14

ActivityPub is awesome, and I'm excited that it's reached this stage. Looking forward to the core Known platform supporting it.

Adding a link to Known to get more context regarding comment above:

https://indieweb.org/Known https://withknown.com/

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#17

Post by bct »

We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now.

What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#18

Post by paroneayea »

devrandomguy wrote: post #3

So, about that federated DELETE operation. In a decentralized network, we can't unilaterally delete a shared piece of content; that is one of the main features of decentralization. Even providing that verb seems kind of deceptive to me; it implies that content that enters the network, could conceivably be purged, which will affect how people use the network. Perhaps DISOWN would be a more accurate verb, especially if…

So, I'm co-editor of the ActivityPub spec, hi! And yes, there's both reasons to want a Delete operation and to be skeptical of it!

Reasons to be skeptical of it: well there's the obvious ones, you might want to hold on to some content coming your way and lots of people are disappointed to see things disappear. Mutating networks have some dangers for sure.

Reasons it to want it, or that it's there: well, this is how all the existing federated social networks work. ActivityPub was designed in the context of standardizing basically something that projects like Mastodon, Diaspora, MediaGoblin, GNU Social, etc can use. And that is how things work now... mutation and federated deletion has been part of the existing federated social web for a decade. And we're trying to build something people can hook into their existing systems. People may also change their minds about things. Should they have the authority to remove their own posts? An open question, but at the very least, whether a server removes the content or not, a Delete is a request to do so across the network.

However, yes, there is an alternative structure one can imagine for these things, and that's something a bit closer to something git-like in the way that branches point at commits, but may change at which commit they point to over time, but the commits themselves never change. That's a desirable thing to explore, and I've blogged about it: http://dustycloud.org/blog/an-even-more-distributed-activity...

And we're even looking at exploring it, possibly, in the Social Web Incubator Community Group: https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub_extensions#Possible_futu...

BTW, if you're interested in such things, the community group is open to everyone and is hosting weekly meetings https://www.w3.org/community/swicg/ and we'll be hosting a meeting next week https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-05-31

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#19

Post by paroneayea »

bct wrote: post #17

We know how to build protocols for federated systems - there must be at least a dozen serious efforts at federated social media by now. What we don't know (or what we've forgotten) is how to get people to use federated systems.

It's tricky, though people are using them. Mastodon probably is seeing the most success at the moment. Over half a million users by current estimates. Not everyone who signs up stays around, but there's still quite a bit of retention. We could do better.

We need to make these things easier to host and deploy though. Having worked on MediaGoblin for many years now, I've found the most depressing part of it is that not only is it hard for people to start hosting things, it's even harder for them to keep it running... and it's not just MediaGoblin; you'll find this of most social network things. Most especially, people become afraid to upgrade their systems. I'm hopeful that systems like Guix will help in that regard, but that's a whole direction to explore itself: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/solving-the-de...

Re: ActivityPub: a federated social web standard

#20

Post by smarx007 »

The standard is awesome and looks well-designed. The biggest issue is that it was lead solely by the people around Mastodon/Pump.io/Mediagoblin. While not a bad thing per se (on the contrary, it shows a commitment to a free internet), it means that there is little chance for it to penetrate the general (social) networking scene (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, VK etc.).

Did you try reaching out to each of those major social networking websites to offer collaboration on this standard?

P.S. I understand that ActivityPub represents a radical shift from the centralised social networking, but if I remember correctly Facebook, Google and IBM previously collaborated on open widgets and related functionality until the efforts fell apart: https://github.com/OpenSocial/spec

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