Notices by Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)
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Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Thursday, 21-Sep-2017 09:22:18 UTC 
Mike Macgirvin
Couple of things just in case I run out of time,,,
Pubcrawl has a few interop issues with Mastodon, but nobody is willing to look into why on that side. What I've done is to go back to the spec and all the latest working group decisions and I'm trying to implement it faithfully. If there are problems making it work, you may have to wait for a real communications project to try and federate with before things get solved. Once there's interop with somebody/anybody, you can branch off that to open federation to the walled garden. At the moment we're trying to be faithful to the spec so that somebody can read the spec and look at the packets and figure out who's implementation is buggered.
Multimedia content is going to be sent as an 'Article'. There's a good chance Mastodon will never allow multimedia content. Fuck them. Try and find somebody sensible to work with. We'll send plain text and microblog stuff as a 'Note' which is what Mastodon uses. Attachments/images are all separate and appended to the end of the content, so this won't work at all for story-board narratives and signatures will break if you have to modify somebody's content to fit that representation. If you want to get support, look at News organisations of any kind. They know how multimedia content needs to work. The ActivityPub folks all have their noses so far up Eugen's bum that you aren't going to get any support from them and nobody therein has any experience with real world communications or federation issues. They're web people, and most are kids who've never done anything like this before.
Apple appears to have removed third-party cookies entirely in its latest browser release. This is a problem for decentralised permissions; but thankfully only applies to images and media elements. My thinking if other browser vendors follow suit is to re-purpose the 'sslify' module to proxy private photos/videos. These can and should be buffered/streamed. At that point it's probably a good time to abandon the social networking space and concentrate on content management, since openwebauth will still work just fine; but private media in your stream is going to suck up extra resources to proxy. It's still workable but not as elegant.
Hopefully I'll still be around and will take care of all this stuff, but just in case I'm not.... -
Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2017 09:15:32 UTC
Mike Macgirvin
Trying to come up with a workaround for Mastodon's brain-dead media behaviour. The only solution I've got currently is
if(your friend is using mastodon)
do the wrong thing
else
do the right thing
The issue is that half the metaverse does the wrong thing; which is basically stripping media from HTML content and adding it back as attachments. This is fine for OStatus and public networks but doesn't work with privacy enhanced services because the messages need to be signed, If you mangle multi-media messages to work on these primitive nets it breaks the signature, so you're basically stuffed. The messages will not federate because the service your friends are using is doing the wrong thing. If you don't mangle the posts to fit that network's policies, the media content will be stripped. If you do mangle the content, the message won't verify and will be discarded.
I do so wish that the people designing these protocols and systems would take a look at what the hell they're doing sometime. They're really screwing up everything for everybody. -
Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Sunday, 03-Sep-2017 20:28:08 UTC
Mike Macgirvin
@Gargron @cwebber - the only thing with an actual RFC behind it when OStatus was born was atom. Salmon, webfinger, pubsubhubbub and activitystreams were all "proposals" of some type; and those that have since been standardised have done so in a radically different form (ActivityStreams and Webfinger were both standardised as json and only vaguely resemble the old XML specs). What made these things "standard" for OStatus was apparently the fact that they were proposed at one time for the OpenSocial initiative and many were in use at Google (which dropped all of them when G+ was born). -
Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Friday, 18-Aug-2017 22:32:28 UTC
Mike Macgirvin
@cwebber might probably be more interested that red/hubzilla's actitivitypub is quite functional and has been for a while now and I've been trying like heck to find some site on Mastodon that isn't blocking me that might let me do some interop testing, but it appears I may be blocked from his and @Gargron 's mastodon (messages are consistently delivered to a black hole responding 'success') and he doesn't seem to read his email - or has blocked me there also.
I'm right fine at being blocked, but there has been a lot of implementation information flowing around and things we've learned which might help the next implementor which might warrant his attention. I don't know if this comment will get through either, but it appears that @paulfree14 isn't blocked so I'll take a gamble on it. -
Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Friday, 18-Aug-2017 09:11:33 UTC
Mike Macgirvin
Accidentally left a tap on this morning whilst filling the water trough for the horses - and went off to work. 22,000 litres of water - gone. Ouch. #raindance
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