Personal Social Networks on ActivityPub - Private Posting and UX

Convener: Jesse Karmani (@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social)

Notes

Website: https://frequency.app/about

• How to make it approachable for people who aren’t tech experts?

• Jesse’s building Frequency - https://frequency.app/about - it’s an app, currently built on a custom fork of Mastodon (could plug in a different server at some point). Doesn’t use encryption, waiting for AP standard. Doesn’t currently have DMs.

• What do we need to do to bring people onto federated social and get people off the “big social” mindset?

• For forums, easy when it’s all on one site, it gets complicated once you federate. There are existing implementations - FEP 1b12 powers Lemmy and Piefed, and 400e (Smithereen), also content containers. A priority for NodeBB going forward, don’t want to do their own thing.

• Have had mistakenly public conversations … oops! need a clearer mode.

• On Mastodon, all media is in a public AWS bucket – so it’s not private. Jesse’s trying to add expiring URLs, but ran into caching problems.

• It’s weird that It’s private scopes are not well-established in Mastodon. There’s a number of platforms that do support privately messaging a collection of followers, but it’s just not widespread or established as a norm yet. Is it to simplify the UX?

• Mixing addressing and visibility. If you want to enable additional functionality and behaviors, you add additional complexity. fedibird has circles. Having to work with Mastodon complicates a lot of things.

• Cory talked about the problem of group action, that’s a huge challenge in fedi! Really hard to roll out new things and still be backwards compatible – analogy of progressive enhancement.. Ben did that with ActivityIntents – if your server doesn’t support it, it lets you know. Creates pressure. If there’s a better way, all for it!

• People want a closed space for conversations and don’t want the risk of sending it out more broadly – PixelFed is for communicating with the world, Signal is for family. Frequency tries to address this with the onboarding, prepare them for what it’s going to be.

• What percentage of the Fediverse is the Threadiverse? Hard to know, what’s the metric? Threadiverse coversations are more concentrated, so there are richer conversations – lots of upvotes, lots of replies. But it doesn’t co-exist well with Mastodon – posts are broadcast with no context.

• NodeBB wound up disabling this to Mastodon because it was too confusing. FetchAllReplies will help with Mastodon-only posts, although it’s fragile (if a node in the middle is dead it loses the rest of the thread)

• On Facebook, learned to understand the privacy/visibility expectations – they became intuitive. What’s the intuitive understanding for what kind of openness you’re in? Perhaps flavors of openness.

• Circles are something you curate yourself. Diaspora’s Aspects was basically designed around this assumption, messaging a collection of specific people

• Would love a facebook-style friend equivalent to complement “following”. People are very used to “friend requests” from FB, following is weird to them.

• A challenge in general: when you send software to an untrusted server, you can’t guarantee anything. How to let users know that without getting in their face? Threads Fediverse has a warning (perhaps a little too scary)

• Frequency thinking of subscription model, including a family plan. A lot of people are (very justifiably) concerned with sharing kids pics on big social.