jae

@jkap

CEO of posting

they/she
jkap.io/

butch jewish dyke
part of @staff, cohost user #1
married to @kadybat

This user can say it

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not anymore lol

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jae @jkap12/20/2022, 3:59 PM

no guarantees we're gonna ship anything here but we're considering it. if we do, it'll likely be outbound only, since we're not currently comfortable with inbound content that we can't moderate (i do not consider defederation to be an effective form of moderation). i realize this sort of just makes it a glorified RSS feed, but we've gotten requests for it so may as well investigate.

happy to discuss in the comments, although keep in mind that since nothing is firm i probably won't be able to answer much if anything.

#devlog #ActivityPub

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Charlotte the Useless Ghost @confusedcharlot12/20/2022, 4:05 PM

do potential clients have a way of knowing it's read only?

jae @jkap12/20/2022, 4:07 PM

still investigating how we manage this. as of a couple years ago, mastodon required you to list an inbox for it to treat the implementation as valid, but i'm unsure at the moment the best way to essentially have a fake inbox (subject matter experts lmk where i should look for this, or if mastodon's requirements have changed here)

nora @noracodes12/20/2022, 4:16 PM

As a sometimes instance op, if you do have a fake inbox please make it 200 on requests; failed requests get retried and could cause problems for both ends.

Otherwise, AP syndication seems like a great idea to me; there is already a way (RSS -> RSS Gateway -> AP) which is similarly read-only, so this would just be giving folks more control.

One unique opportunity you have is to allow federated likes only, so that people could interact in a way you wouldn't have to moderate.

(Personally I think an allowlist-only full federation would be neat, but I totally understand if you don't want to take on even that amount of moderation work.)

jae @jkap12/20/2022, 4:37 PM

inbound likes is an interesting concept. and yeah, allowlist-only federation is still more moderation than we're comfortable with, especially since a big component there is trusting whatever instances we've added to that list to do effective moderation on their end, as well as differences in community guidelines and practices between the sites, etc etc

nora @noracodes12/20/2022, 4:41 PM

Makes sense! If you want this rapidly, there is actually existing software you could just spin up, with maybe a few tweaks to how feeds are created, to do read-only federation. It's even your existing tech stack, I think!

jae @jkap12/20/2022, 4:42 PM

good to know! probably wouldn't spin this up as-is (from a brief glance, it doesn't really meet our Coding Standards For Production) but it's an extremely useful reference implementation

㋬Zen1th @zenith39112/20/2022, 4:18 PM

what are the usecases for it?

nora @noracodes12/20/2022, 4:23 PM

People who use Fediverse software could follow Cohost accounts directly from their Fediverse accounts.

㋬Zen1th @zenith39112/20/2022, 8:19 PM

fediverse is interoptable? like someone on mastodon could follow a cohost account?

nora @noracodes12/20/2022, 10:59 PM

That's the idea! ActivityPub, the protocol the powers Mastodon and other fediverse software, is specifically for this kind of website to interoperate with others.

PinballsWizard @pinball12/20/2022, 4:33 PM

mastodon sucks bad for posting art, so outbound such that i could post once and have people who are not here come back to cohost for The Good Files might be nice. though as i have learned every server along the way will rehost and compress it down again anyway, so i'm uncertain how useful it will be for most who only follow that way. publishing updates out via activitypub for edited posts here may be a tricky thing?

i do also generally agree with the opt-in and cohost+ only suggestions others have made

jae @jkap12/20/2022, 4:35 PM

there is an Update activity type we can send out for edits, although it's one of those things that i feel like is very implementation dependent as to if it's even used.

Rose @MewMus12/21/2022, 3:12 AM

I was going to make almost exactly this post, so instead just going to comment here to state that I agree with all of Pinballs concerns but I'm not entirely against the idea of ActivityPub support IF it's opt-in

KamiKat_2012 @KamiKat-201212/20/2022, 4:38 PM

What's an ActivityPub?

Beowulf!!!@beowulf12/20/2022, 4:44 PM

It's the protocol that Mastodon instances (and other platforms in the Fediverse) use to communicate with each other. Basically, implementing this would mean that Mastodon users could follow your Cohost page.

Elizabeth @woebetide12/20/2022, 5:42 PM

I don’t feel like the platforms are really that compatible, CSS crimes won’t translate, long form posts won’t translate necessarily well to masto instances that expect a lower character limit, they would still have to click through to come here to see those properly… that said, good luck if you do, already seen two reminders today that I want nothing to do with mastodon, and appreciate you will make it opt in, because I wouldn’t want it.

~@modulusshift12/20/2022, 6:07 PM

hmm. To be honest, I figured you all didn't have a high opinion of federation, so I wasn't expecting anything in this space, really. I get the concerns with inbound, but that does mean that if I wanted one account, it would make more sense to have it be elsewhere in the fediverse since at least I'd get some cohost content mixed in, instead of missing the entirety of the fediverse by choosing here. That's reductionist, of course, I wouldn't be a Plus! member if I didn't think something special was going on here haha, and it also doesn't really change the calculus on your end re: moderation.

jae @jkap12/20/2022, 6:16 PM

it's complicated. i think viewing federation as the be-all-end-all solution to social media is misguided; the problem with social media is not centralization, and mastodon's solution comes with its own suite of problems that (imo) can make things worse (hence, why we're looking at outbound-only). that said, i think there is benefit to syndicating content to other locations (whole point of us implementing atom/json feed), and i think outbound-only activitypub meets those goals as well.

~@modulusshift12/20/2022, 7:50 PM

makes sense! thanks for spinning it out a little more.

bcj @bcj12/20/2022, 9:26 PM

Would this still open you up to some (light) additional moderation stuff?

Would you feel obliged to do things like defederate from e.g., obviously-nazi servers? It's outgoing-only, so the risks are much less, and I know any of those servers could already access stuff by running an atom -> activitypub bot so maybe it's a moot point reguardless.

Fallible Algebra @fallible-algebra12/21/2022, 12:52 AM

Honestly not a fan of the idea, I think depending on the implementation it would give cohost a bad reputation on fedi for broken, long, incompatibly formatted posts wrt CSS & shares.

SLIMEPATTERN @SLIMEPATTERN12/26/2022, 12:08 PM

deeply agreeing with the requests for keeping it opt-in

Nathan Friedly @nfriedly4/12/2023, 3:22 AM

YES, PLEASE DO THIS!

I really signed up for an account (and waited for it to be activated) just to say that.

I read a couple of cool posts by @cathoderaydude (linked from hacker news) and I initially thought that I'd like to have an RSS feed of this, but then I realized he also frequently posts a lot of shorter things, and so ActivityPub probably makes more sense than RSS.

I followed him here but, if I'm being honest, I'm probably not going to remember to come back here to check for new content. (I only remembered to finish posting this because I left the tab open.) I will, however, occasionally check my mastodon instance.

Read-only, or read+like only is fine with me.

Pinned Tags

jae

@jkap

CEO of posting

doing some light reading

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