Posts by mike@macgirvin.com
(DIR) Post #AUzkkT6lx7oZBhKIHg by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-04-25T01:02:39Z
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So here's the high level overview...The first component is your external identity manager. This will behave somewhat like Mastodon's current external account verification interface. Links are created based on the existence of a secure relationship with rel="me" links (secure meaning https with no http redirects in the redirect chain).This module just creates and manages verified links. The second component is the Channel Manager (which anybody using streams or zap or hubzilla is already familiar with). This currently provides a selector for your local channels (on this instance), and channels you can moderate (on any instance). What we're going to do is add another section so you can teleport to your external identities (which includes nomadic identities and any rel="me" identities you added via the external Identity Manager). So basically a single dropdown will let you visit any of your identities from the channel menu. OpenWebAuth would be nice, but chances are high that you've got a long-life cookie on these sites and it will work without authentication. This gets you 90% of the way there. Next comes the Channel Sources module which lets you re-publish any posts that arrive from certain connections. Anybody with a rel="me" relationship will automatically become potential channel sources. This lets you automatically re-publish any content that you published on these separate accounts to your streams channel (with an optional category or tag, depending on the source). So your streams account can (if you want) be a central aggregator for all your fediverse accounts and will boost or share all the content from your additional identities to the followers of your streams identity. This part is completely optional if you want to have separate followers on each service. This provides the basic functionality. Then further down the road, we'll probably do some follower merging from your linked accounts and let you address these external followers to your other accounts from posts you make in streams. The goal is provide the inverse of using your streams account as the aggregator, and let you use your Mastodon as the aggregator (for instance). This may not be possible unless the other service provides re-publishing tools. But I'm also looking at some other possibilities since I don't like depending on any projects which are resistant to innovation. Will try to find a way to achieve our desired goals without requiring any other projects to evolve. That's the high level overview. As always, once these pieces start coming together, the feature is likely to evolve in different directions as people start to explore the new possibilities.
(DIR) Post #AVPbxPG5jHy7XEjnk0 by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-05-07T09:29:50Z
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(streams) current privacy settings.
(DIR) Post #AVnaXWhMdRUgo42Dp2 by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-05-18T23:11:17Z
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Since implementing Google+ like "Collections" (i.e. sub-channels) in Zap a few years ago and not being pleased with the result, I went back to the drawing board. Now I've got a plan for making them effective. In retrospect, the whole model was backwards. More later. I'm still in the design phase and there are a couple more details to flesh out. But overall I think this will be a dramatic improvement over all the other fediverse implementations of this feature (laughing).
(DIR) Post #AVrUAI50jXzKdrndrc by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-05-19T20:42:20Z
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Hopefully without extinguishing the only projects with working comment controls in the process. We're not the enemy. I'm happy with having a canReply field. We support that. If somebody replies and they aren't allowed, just drop the reply. Period. Possibly send a Reject. We don't need to send signed approvals to everybody involved in the conversation. That is the most Rube Goldberg thing I've seen proposed yet. It doesn't scale. It will cause a civil war in the fediverse. If that's what you want, please unfollow me.
(DIR) Post #AVrbCq2M9U0aDUihQe by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-05-21T00:29:30Z
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There was some lively discussion on the socialhub and I thought we were making progress, but now I'm not so sure. Talks have broken down. Mastodon appears to be moving ahead and don't care what I think or what it will do to the fediverse. We already have comment permissions and don't even need FEP-5624. If that document is played as is, we will no longer be able to federate with Mastodon - full stop. The fediverse will slow to a crawl and server costs will skyrocket because network traffic will triple - just to continue federating the exact same number of messages. Classic EEE.
(DIR) Post #AWZC7nwe55CDGhhSjI by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-06-11T01:40:37Z
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https://codeberg.org/streams/streams
(DIR) Post #AWlK3usIfZ3w01qSCu by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-06-16T21:48:08Z
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By default streams caches media - but you can turn it off.
(DIR) Post #AWrP4DmE3cdvLHjCbI by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-06-19T19:42:40Z
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And streams is the name of a repository. There is no brand or fediverse project with that name. F*ck brands.
(DIR) Post #AXhUx1JFqTpj2CkIOO by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-07-14T23:35:10Z
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Disappointed really. I thought Threads was going to bring some innovation to the #fediverse and force projects to re-think everything they were doing. But no, it's just another lame text/plain Twitter clone. It's making me question everything I know about Darwin when it's the defective-by-design projects that survive and thrive - and the strong and capable are pushed to ever smaller and darker corners of the fediverse.
(DIR) Post #AY4NtECIpFGBru7bCS by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-07-25T00:16:22Z
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People exist in the world that you don't agree with. It's no different on social media - any kind of social media. I block no sites, yet never see any bad stuff. I do this by using an old fashioned concept called "permissions" which prevents total strangers putting posts in my timeline (inbox) in the first place. The "federated timeline" aka "public stream" doesn't exist here, because it's an un-moderated cesspool. So from my point of view it's a non-problem. If the police want to find and arrest these people - that's their business. My business is creating safe online spaces.
(DIR) Post #AYQe4UTyfoYGXrTD28 by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-08-04T21:46:26Z
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I'm currently adding the price and location data to the post in the streams repository (since we provide distance search and other location services). Suggestion: It might make sense going forward to use the standard ActivityPub location (Place) schema for this and put it on the activity instead of inside a custom element with non-standard attributes. We support that already and then the only special thing I would need to extract from the flohmarkt data element is the price.What's required to provide a remote interact button? We do support remote interactions in streams via the ostatus webfinger follow template (similar to Mastodon) so this shouldn't be too difficult to add. Cheers.
(DIR) Post #AYYY1Z6A0hLPX2ENxA by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-08-09T04:37:52Z
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In the conversation model, all comments are sent to and re-delivered by the "owner" of the top-level post in the conversation. That's in quotes because the owner isn't necessarily the author. In fact it is the 'sender'. The owner also sets the privacy for the conversation, and can remove comments from the conversation or delete it completely. It belongs to them. The mechanism supports things like private groups and 'circles/aspects' because the conversation owner is the authority of who was addressed in this conversation. They are the only entity that knows specifically who was addressed, which may be private lists they control and which nobody else has permission to enumerate. If they relay all the comments, the conversation remains complete at all nodes that received the top-level post.In practise, (and here is where we differ significantly from the 'posts' model) -- you still have threaded conversations, and you still specify the inReplyTo field to indicate which comment you are responding to, but you still must send the post to the conversation owner for delivery -- who delivers it to everybody in the original conversation audience accordingly. You cannot change the privacy to something else or inject DMs in the middle of the thread. The conversation does not belong to you or the person whose post you're commenting on. It belongs completely to the sender of the first post in the thread. What's interesting is that Diaspora and Friendica developed the exact same mechanism simultaneously and independently for supporting conversation privacy.
(DIR) Post #AZ4KtV0YxQh9K9GpG4 by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-08-24T21:12:17Z
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Be advised there may or may not be anything deserving of a warning in the summary field. It's purely a Mastodon convention. The de facto usage definition comes from the early work on RSS by news organisations in the mid 90s. What they wanted was titlesummary (brief description)bodyMost syndication/federation protocols were built around that model. ActivityStreams maps these to name, summary, and content. Content warnings really belong elsewhere, but this wasn't offered in the AS spec. This might be a good subject for an FEP, so that there's something well-defined to use instead of summary. I for one would adopt it in a heartbeat to get our summary field back. My advice to @Gregory would be to ignore summary completely on DMs if they don't fit your UX design, but hide images if sensitive is set. People can lose their jobs (or got to jail) over "indecent" images popping up without warning.
(DIR) Post #AZ6BjLWkqEQVkjKcHQ by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-08-25T09:33:20Z
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Many of our members post with titles - quite often in fact. We don't hide the content when a post has a title. Telling me I have to hide the content when there's a title is even worse than telling me to hide it when there's a summary. Hubzilla for instance lets you import RSS feeds into your stream. Lots of RSS software adds summaries whether you like it or not. Some only post summaries with no content. So once again, please let's get rid of this abomination and create a real content warning indicator so we can use summary as a "summary" like we have for decades.
(DIR) Post #AZGtSOTswfZFYRJcYK by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-08-30T22:18:56Z
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!Streams Fresh release from the streams repository. Available now. Includes some enhancements to our defenses against Meta/Threads after reviewing their updated ToS. Also includes access to protected content via OpenWebAuth over Opensearch.And some other stuff. You will want this update regardless of your stance regarding Meta.If you are uncomfortable with Meta and their business practises, visit 'admin/security' and add 'threads.net' to 'Block communications from these sites' -- and also set 'Require signed fetch requests'.
(DIR) Post #AZHpVKx4JnEIop4cnw by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-08-31T09:51:26Z
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It's nearly always the memory you give the database -- and also how the database server is "tuned". There are a lot of settings that control the various cache sizes, and the changes these make are dramatic. There are people that are really good at doing this, but I'm not one of them.
(DIR) Post #AZT6P4ib3g8SxV1U48 by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-09-05T20:28:16Z
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I provided my input to the AP spec editor and it was rejected outright. Everything I provided to the ActivityPub editor was rejected outright. If there were any questions, it had to go through the Mastodon dictator, who rejected anything he didn't invent. And then the ActivityPub editor would likewise reject it. "Mastodon has millions of users, you don't".That's the way the process works. The major concern was that nomadic identity is hard, and the clock was ticking on when the spec had to be finalised. The ActivityPub editor also insisted that it be done using the draft digital identity spec. So that ensured it would never make it into ActivityPub. Here we are 5-6 years later and they still can't figure out how to do nomadic identity in a decentralised framework (outside of using torrents or centralised resolvers). Meanwhile we've had it, used it, and improved it for well over a decade.There's a specification in the public domain. Some complain that it isn't enough, but I'm one person in a planet of 8 billion and haven't had any help developing this. The only help I ever get is with bike shed stuff - web interfaces. Not one person has offered any help polishing up the spec or improving the actual implementation code or even offered critique and discussing the subject. Just "I can't use this. Bye." [edit: apologies. That isn't entirely correct. I did get help from one person.]I've started to pick it up and try again using did's as a proof of concept, but I'm retired now and really can't be bothered dying on the same hill over and over again. But I will try and update Nomad (the protocol, formerly Zot) to use a did: form. It's just a replacement WebMTA for delivering JSON ActivityStreams which is nomadic aware. There's still no chance of it ever getting into ActivityPub unless it's invented by the Mastodon dictator.Meanwhile the spec is in the public domain and there are working implementations and it federates with ActivityPub and nobody is holding a gun to anybody's head. https://codeberg.org/streams/streams
(DIR) Post #AZT8bNm0EpIRRKc2AS by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-09-05T21:05:07Z
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And as it relates to fep-7628, we provide the "copiedTo" property in ActivityPub as an analogue to Mastodon's "movedTo" property. It has the same semantics as the Mastodon property except the original identity isn't deleted. This is documented in the FEDERATION.md document of the streams repository.
(DIR) Post #AZbfmrFI9opbeiRPjE by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-09-09T23:48:56Z
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LDAP is x.500 "light" and was developed at UMich. The only reason Microsoft uses it is because Netscape used it first to drive their enterprise strategy (our corporate customers demanded a central directory service rather than a separate user service for each of the servers we offered) and adopting LDAP in ActiveDirectory then became part of Bill Gates plan to embrace, extend, and exterminate us.
(DIR) Post #AZzesMR3gGF08O6sgi by mike@macgirvin.com
2023-09-21T12:08:18Z
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Uhm, we may have gotten wires crossed somehow. Streams supports Mastodon's Move activity and moves a fediverse account in accordance with the procedurre used by Mastodon. This has nothing to do with Streams nomadic identity mechanisms. Nomadic identity does not use the Move mechanism, because a copy was already made and there is nothing to move. Streams does report nomadic instances in alsoKnownAs and provides information that a nomadic clone was created (as opposed to a one-time migration) via the copiedTo property. Sites and projects which wish to support nomadic identity may make use of these properties to discover and link the different identifiers.