Re: Thoughts on directions for a rebooted SWICG

It is possible to write efficient Ruby, but efficiency has probably not 
been the focus for Mastodon, developer productivity has likely been more 
important.

One might also consider:
* PHP - some activity pub implementations in this that could be extended)
* Go - relatively light resource use
* Kotlin - may be helpful for mobile clients, but can also be used for 
server code

Other than moderation, one issue might be information credibility.  On 
centralized platforms, it is possible to monitor fast spreading 
information and if it is not credible and can cause harm, counter the 
information and point out why it is not credible.  Allowing for services 
that check for false information can be helpful.

On 12/1/22 22:23, Aaron Gray wrote:
> a) I read VM code bases, V8 is far far more optimized than Ruby's
> b) Installing Mastodon overheated my BananaPi M3 and shutdown it down !
> 
> On Thu, 1 Dec 2022 at 19:04, Christopher Guess <cguess@gmail.com 
> <mailto:cguess@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Aaron,
> 
>     Do you have any numbers for the claim that ruby is ineffecient
>     compared to JS? I’ve never seen it claim to be more power effecient
>     (and on a Mastodon server speed should probably be preferred over
>     power effeciency).
> 
>     -Christopher Guess
>     cguess@gmail.com
>     US/WhatsApp/Signal: +1 262.893.1037
>     PGP: AAE7 5171 0D81 B45B – https://keybase.io/cguess
>     <https://keybase.io/cguess>
> 
>         On Thursday, Dec 01, 2022 at 1:31 PM, Aaron Gray
>         <aaronngray@gmail.com <mailto:aaronngray@gmail.com>> wrote:
>         The issue I have with Mastodon is its server is written in Ruby
>         and is very inefficient. And as a result it is not green energywise.
> 
>         I am looking at putting together first a Node.js implementation
>         similar to Mastodon as a reference implementation to work from
>         as I find Rails very strange (also) then look at a full RDF
>         based implementation, followed by an implementation in a static
>         language like Rust or C++.
> 
>         I am gemming up on all the standards involved first and having a
>         look at some of the existing implementations that we do have.
>         I am compiling a list of links for the whole area too as well
>         which I will probably put on GitHub.
>         There are some existing resource lists :-
>         https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/
>         <https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/>
>         https://activitypub.rocks/ <https://activitypub.rocks/>
>         And a page for implementers :-
>         https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers <https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers>
>         Activity Streams seems to be the actual data side of the
>         ActivityPub protocol used for communicating between "mailboxes"
>         :- https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
>         <https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/>
> 
>         It would be nice to have protocol implementations in all the
>         main languages TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Rust, C++, Python,
>         ..., adhering to a standard API structure isomorphic to the
>         problem domain / specs, and to have UML based documentation
>         With ActivityStreams like db and db adapters for main dbs like
>         GraphDB and more traditional DB's like PostgresSQL.
>         So ActivityStreams as the data model, and ActivityPub as the
>         communications protocol running over HTTP(S)
> 
>         Regards,
> 
>         Aaron
> 
>         On Wed, 30 Nov 2022 at 22:12, Erin Shepherd
>         <erin.shepherd@e43.eu <mailto:erin.shepherd@e43.eu>> wrote:
> 
>             __
>             Eight (!) years ago, I kicked off what became /AcitvityPub/
>             with an e-mail to the SocialWG mailing lists linking to a
>             draft of a protocol I named /ActivityPump/; I hoped but
>             never imagined it would end up being quite so influential.
> 
>             It's been nearly four years since the ActivityPub
>             specification was published, and never has it felt felt more
>             urgent that we find a way to revisit aspects of the standard
>             /together/. None of what follows is in any way gospel, these
>             are just my thoughts; but I feel one big thing we've been
>             lacking is direction and this is an attempt to give that
> 
>             -- 
> 
>             The challenge, as I see it, with developing anything
>             involved in the social web, has always been that everyone's
>             developing their own thing. That's really exciting, and it
>             makes the ecosystem incredibly vibrant, but it's also quite
>             troublesome, because you end up with 15 people working on 15
>             different things, rather than working towards a cohesive
>             whole. The ecosystem and the network have suffered from
>             this; I feel like one of the reasons things never really got
>             off of the ground here after the SocialWG closed is that
>             there was no obvious direction.
> 
>             So I would like to suggest that we pick /themes/ to work on
>             - one initially, with scope to add more as those are
>             established. Perhaps these might eventualy feed into the
>             charter for any future ActivityPub WG. We should, in
>             general, try and focus on areas causing user issues or
>             friction in the network today.
> 
>             I think there's a general sentiment across the fediverse
>             that our biggest problems are to do with inadequite tools to
>             handle /moderation and harassment/. There's a mix of
>             implementation improvements and protocol improvements that
>             need to be made in this area, but I think it's important
>             that we do the protocol development /in particular/ outside
>             the scope of any single project because it's the sort of
>             thing which is likely to become a mandatory feature.
> 
>             Some particular sub-areas of focus that I can think of:
> 
>              1. *Spam Filtering/Sockpuppet Prevention*
>                 Or: how to stop people from setting up new servers to
>                 bypass your blocks (without caving and resorting to
>                 allow-list federation)
> 
>                 I made a post about this yesterday
>                 <https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2022/11/a-better-moderation-system-is-possible-for-the-social-web/>
> 
>                 This one's a relatively complex addition, but I think
>                 it's vital.
>              2. *Indirect Harrassment via Replies
>                 *Presently, threads are "backwards authenticated" via
>                 the /inReplyTo/ field from the comment to the parent,
>                 but there's no forward authentication from parent to
>                 comment. Even if I block you, it's possible for you to
>                 reply to my posts, and while my server won't show your
>                 replies when looking at my post, other servers which saw
>                 your replies will.
> 
>                 I don't think allowing people to make "unapproved"
>                 replies is bad; but I do think that when looking at a
>                 post, implementations /should/ de-prioritise such
>                 replies (think of Twitter's "more replies have been
>                 hidden" feature, which normally hides a bunch of
>                 cryptocurrency spammers)
> 
>                 I think this is a relatively straightforward protocol
>                 change, involving adding a way to indicate a post is in
>                 "approved replies" mode, and distributing those
>                 approvals. (I think Hubzilla has already implemented
>                 something vaguely - but not completely - along these lines)
>              3. *Better tools for moderators
>                 *This is perhaps the least well defined point (and the
>                 one which, in some ways, requires the most implementer
>                 buy-in), but I really think we need to specify both the
>                 existing reporting protocol, and extend it to (a) allow
>                 withdrawing reports and (b) add coments, so server
>                 moderators can communicate with each other "in band".
> 
>             I don't think this is the only topic area worthy of
>             discussion, but I think it's by far the most vital. There
>             are other areas I see as very important long term (e.g.
>             codifying a way to move accounts without the cooperation of
>             the server you're moving away from, simplifying the
>             cross-server follow flow, and /eventually/ supporting
>             nomadic identities), but I think the solutions to those are
>             less well defined, and the need is less pressing.
> 
>             I'm very curious to see the group's thoughts.
> 
>             (One other thing I think would be a /good/ thing to do is to
>             revise the AP spec and explicitly document the holes we left
>             because we couldn't find agreement with actual practice; but
>             that would be a task for any ActivityPub WG that is formed,
>             which I would support)
> 
>             -- Erin
> 
> 
> 
>         -- 
>         Aaron Gray
> 
>         Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language
>         Researcher, Information Theorist, and Computer Scientist.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Aaron Gray
> 
> Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher, 
> Information Theorist, and Computer Scientist.
>

Received on Friday, 2 December 2022 06:36:57 UTC