Convener: Philip Patsch (@Profpatsch@mastodon.xyz)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Jim DeLaHunt (@jdlh@mstdn.ca)
• Diego galvalisi (@diegogalvalisi@mastodon.social)

Website: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Notes

• See Evan Podromou’s presentation on ActivityPub from Day 1 of this conference

• Official governance group https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/social/

• Community group, free to join https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/

• The experience of trying to develop an app using ActivityPub. Many different standards to implement. ActivityPub spec is incomplete on some important areas.

  • Conflict between spec’s mention of JSON-LD and developer advice that implementing JSON-LD is impractical

• There is a disconnect between the claimed standard published by W3C and the actual de facto standard to which people implement.

  • Similar to situation of HTML between W3C HTML group and WhatWG.

• FEP, the Fediverse Enhancement Protocol process

  • https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep

• There appears to be a split between European and US developers. European developers funded by public funds, smaller budgets. US developers funded by private capital, bigger budgets, have a requirement to make money.

• What ActivityPub verbs does Flohmarkt use?

  • AP has no verbs or objects for commerce defined.

  • There is a tension: use new objects for commerce, not supported, or the objects which Mastodon can support

    • e.g. display merchandise for sale as “Notes”, not as commerce items.

  • Can use FEP process to propose new vocabulary.

  • FEP-0837 Federated Marketplaces https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0837/fep-0837.md

  • But even for the marketplace, there is a difference between an approach which lets people see merchandise at no cost, or which requires payment in order to see merchandise.

• Problem: how to add new object types when existing software does not support them.

  • Must send different objects depending on what the receiver can understands.

  • May need a mechanism like Accepts header of HTTP.

• Why can’t we take SilverPill’s “ActivityPub for Developers” and rewrite it to drop obselete topics (e.g. JSON-LD) and add current requireemnts (e.g. HTTP Signatures)

• How to combine writing a standard with effectively implementing it, and getting feedback from implementers to improve the standard?

  • IRC-V3 might be a process to emulate.

  • IETF might be a process to emulate. “Rough consensus and running code”.

• Jim: my theary of change involves:

  1. get committed users who want the feature,
  2. get implementers who will make the feature,
  3. get a corner of the ecosystem thriving using the feature,
  4. use competition to persuade other developers to implement the feature.

• https://plaz.social/