Notices by Christopher Allan Webber (cwebber@toot.cat)

@maiyannah I think many people might actually not want a federated twitter-like social network at least, and would prefer one where people can set up smaller opt-in communities, as opposed to broadly public conversations.

But I think peoples' preferences are pretty broad-ranging, and many people are also exploring the consequences.

Wow, apparently NextCloud beta is out with some ActivityPub support in it. I knew they were planning to do it but I didn't know it was happening already :O

@maloki @polymerwitch @cyrinsong Sure. So this is a W3C group about the next stages of getting work done on the federated social web. The group is both for technical work but also community stuff, ranging from standards extensions to anti-abuse tooling. It's extending the work of the Social Working Group, which is wrapping up. Does that help?

Hey everyone! So the first call of the Social Web Incubator Community Group is at 4PM GMT this Friday, May 5th. I hope you can make it!

https://www.w3.org/community/swicg/2017/05/01/social-web-incubator-community-group-kick-off-call/

This will be a somewhat loose call, going over topics of the group and the state of things.

Call details posted on the blogpost. Quick link to find call time in your timezone: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=6,0,5037649&h=6&date=2017-5-5&sln=11-12

I find it absurd, still, that "Social Justice Warrior" is a pejorative term. Social justice is good, and fighting for it is good. If anything, I self-identify as one. When I hear someone use the term "SJW" I think of this shirt design: https://kotaku.com/social-justice-warrior-t-shirt-design-by-olly-moss-1627689031

Set your expectations accordingly, I guess.

Rough straw poll of sorts:

So the W3C Social Web Community Group is open to everyone (I'm co-chair), and I invite people to join, *particularly* federation implementors: https://www.w3.org/community/swicg/

We're thinking of holding a meeting over Mumble or etc to kick that off. Would people be interested in a loose initial meeting over Mumble sometime within a week or so?

From Vim to Emacs in Fourteen Days https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2015/05/24/from-vim-to-emacs-in-fourteen-days.html

Yesssssss... join usssssss...

this post brought to you by existential dread

Limited lessons from Google and xmpp

- Rock: corporations aren't our champions
- Hard place: but we don't really have good routes for people to take care of themselves and their communities without draining so much personal energy

We need to make self-hosting easier.

> Sometimes you would like to evaluate code that comes from an untrusted party. The safest way to do this is to buy a new computer, evaluate the code on that computer, then throw the machine away. However if you are unwilling to take this simple approach, Guile does include a limited “sandbox” facility that can allow untrusted code to be evaluated with some confidence.

From the docs for Guile's new sandboxed module: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Sandboxed-Evaluation.html

Widely loved free culture artist @davidrevoy got robbed https://framapiaf.org/users/davidrevoy/updates/6855

David does Pepper & Carrot, a free culture comic https://www.peppercarrot.com/ and has done artwork for the Blender Open Movie projects.

Let's help them recover. They have a Patreon https://www.patreon.com/davidrevoy and you can do a one-time donation https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/static4/contribute

Hi everyone! I wrote an ActivityPub tutorial: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w3c/activitypub/gh-pages/activitypub-tutorial.txt

I hope that makes things pretty clear! It's plaintext only with ascii art for now, but I might add it as a preamble to the actual spec. What do people think? Feedback welcome!

Taking a break from hacking, playing some Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. In case you want to watch my sure to be massive fail: http://crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/#watch-paroneayea

So I have a Patreon page now: https://www.patreon.com/cwebber

Will write more soon about why I'm asking for your help, but I've been working on ActivityPub, MediaGoblin, etc full time for the last number of years, trying to make federated networks and decentralized systems happen. It's really hard to fund this stuff, but I think it's too important not to do. If you think so too, consider supporting. Thanks! I appreciate all the help I can get. <3

New Candidate Recommendation revision of ActivityPub released today! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Getting a lot more done now that I'm not stressing about getting things done. Funny how that works!

Basically, I hit complete and total meltdown after pushing myself so hard that I wasn't able to function. I've resolved never to take on that kind of self-pressure anymore... it doesn't make me more productive, and it hurts.

(Ps thanx to all my friends who have listened to me stress out over the last couple weeks, I know I've been annoying at times.)

@maiyannah @deadsuperhero For one thing, we might finally get a common protocol so that Diaspora, GNU Social, Pump.IO, MediaGoblin, Mastodon, etc all work together. I'm also working on a test suite so there should be less "errors" between implementations.

That was the main goal of the working group (and why we spent so long getting community feedback).

Good call with the W3C SocialWG today, we should have a new ActivityPub Candidate Recommendation draft out shortly. (All editorial changes, whew!)

@Gargron @tsyesika So if you are interested in server-to-server only, follow https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#server-to-server-interactions and ignore section 7

ActivityPub is now open for implementation support submission! http://activitypub.rocks/news/submit-implementation-reports.html

Test suite coming out shortly, now's a great time to get writing your AP code :)