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FediForum September 2024:

Location Check-ins, Place and Arrive Activity

/2024-09/session/7-b/

Convener: Mike (@herebox@social.coop)

Notes-taker(s):

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Tags / links to resources / technology discussed, related to this session:

Notes

Arrive and Leave activities

  • Maybe devs are using the Place object instead of Arrive because it’s too specific.
  • Jeremiah: used Foursquare, but only checked in when leaving due to a stalker issue, but maybe arrive doesn’t really need to be that specific.
  • Evan P: Men and women tend to use check-ins quite differently for safety reason, so that’s why there are 2 different activities.

Travel activity

  • Several points along a series.
  • Evan P: Meant to do just this: track a journey of some kind.

Compatibility concerns:

  • The elephant (ancestor) in the room: Mastodon really only supports Notes.
  • Strategy: overload Notes and see how it goes.
  • Jeremiah: Another discvussion yesterday with Emily: Something about summary and title can be used.
  • Evan: That only works on on Create Note activity, not on Arrive activity. Mastodon supports Announce, maybe that?
  • https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/lib/activitypub/activity.rb#L30
  • Meta hashtag structure could be used, e.g. https://www.flickr.com/groups/51035612836@N01/discuss/72157594497877875/
  • Pixelfed does allow adding a Place object and it shows up on the JSON.
  • Canonical place data, so probably Open Street Map (OSM).
  • Evan has places.pub that makes a place for every OSM place.
  • Could also use a mention of a Place as a way to check-in, that’s another way to consent to sharing location.
  • Centralization problem, we want multiples, but probably not 10s of them. Does not require a dramastic diversity to be useful and not centralized. Multiple services could interoperate by using the same OSM id and use alsoKnownAs.

Privacy concerns from Nostr community: removes decimal places of GPS coordinates

  • Apps can ask users on how precise to share, but requires user trust the app only stores that level of precision.
  • Evan: Always the option to make friends-only and private posts.
  • Evan: Making it always intentional when sharing should remove most of the concerns.
  • Fediverse cultural sensitivity: there are people who don’t even want location to be an option.

What are the use cases for Place data?

  • Mike is working on using WordPress to publish notes to Mastodon that include a Place object and Arrive activity. Mastodon will ignore it, but the data is there for other services, so some sort of other aggregation service people opt in to could preserve it. Would mean you can’t use Mastodon for authoring, but we don’t have to wait for it to experiment.
  • Similar to Twitter or Instagram, see the others posts that were made at that place, some sort of centralized source aggregating the posts from posts tagged with a location
  • Something like Bridgy, you follow an account to opt-in to sharing your location from a centralized location.

Evan’s book on ActivityPub: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/activitypub/9781098162733/

Possibility of having OSM have a namespace officially for it, fediverse.openstreetmap.org or something.

Politics of that org seem difficult to navigate (observations as a lightweight contributor), but could start a project with intent to donate to it.

Evan: Might be a good task force within Social Working Group to propose if there are people who are able to participate and move it forward.

Jeremiah: Is there ability for location owner to own their location? OSM data can have any data added to it, so if a place has a social web URL attached, how could that be used for authority for the place?

Consider distinguishing content generally associated with a place vs content associated with an activity at a place (e.g. check-in, event, etc.)