Thoughts on directions for a rebooted SWICG

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