Re: Remixing and Aggregating Task Force

More to the point, Evan, I'm on board with your proposal, and I could
probably be talked into joining a task force.

On Thu, Jun 5, 2025 at 5:29 PM Ryan Barrett <public@ryanb.org> wrote:

> That's a lot! Definitely a maximalist approach. To keep scope manageable,
> and have a prayer of concluding in any reasonable time frame, with
> something we have a chance of getting implementors to prioritize, I'd argue
> that we *not* try to address all of that.
>
> Specifically, I don't think we need to or should specify how feed
> publishers choose the objects in their feeds, especially not in a first
> pass. There's successful prior art in the wild from Bluesky and others that
> define feeds only as ordered, pageable lists of post ids. That allows
> maximum flexibility for implementations to construct feeds however they
> want, and doesn't tie their hands, but still allows interoperability
> between feed publishers, consumers, and other services.
>
> Filtering, aggregation, moderation, algorithms, etc are all great! But I
> don't know that we should bake them into a feed standard. AP already has
> ordered collections; I can see a very manageable first pass here at just
> standardizing "here are my feeds, with some metadata, as ordered
> collections." That, we might actually have a chance of getting eg Mastodon
> to implement by sometime in 2026. 😁
>
> On Thu, Jun 5, 2025 at 2:22 PM Aaron Gray <aaronngray@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> OOh, also this pipeline design also covers moderation of streams, both
>> automated and manual.
>>
>> And also the algorithmic processing of streams including handling streams
>> for younger users who may have their content filtered or limited in some
>> way, either timewise or content wise.
>>
>> Aaron
>>
>> On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 at 22:19, Aaron Gray <aaronngray@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Evan,
>>>
>>> Thank you again for the massive triage process I set in sway by my
>>> observation of unclosed issues and you embarked on handling we are now
>>> probably more than two years down the line.
>>>
>>> On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 at 19:43, Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We have a few projects in the Fediverse that are doing remixing and
>>>> aggregating content and other activities from other Actors. Two good
>>>> examples are Surf and Channel.org.
>>>>
>>> This is a very interesting area that I have thought about a lot over the
>>> years. And think it really needs to be more generalized to handle and
>>> encompass all possible use cases.
>>>
>>> Basically theres a pipeline of four processes, that of selecting posts
>>> from a number of feeds to a number of feeds, that of optionally filtering
>>> those posts based on criteria, that of ordering or sorting of collected
>>> posts in some form of automated or manual process in those feeds, and that
>>> of posting the resulting posts to one or a number of output feeds.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I think this is an interesting enough pattern that we should open up a
>>>> Task Force at the SocialCG to investigate standardizing some of these
>>>> features. Important questions to ask are:
>>>>
>>>>    - How should an aggregated feed appear on the Fediverse? Is it just
>>>>    another Actor that Announces activities and content that meet its
>>>>    requirements? Or is there another structure?
>>>>
>>>> Similar to, in and out boxes for continuity with the existing
>>> ActivityPub model.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>    - How do we handle ordering of feeds? Some feeds might not be
>>>>    reverse chronologically ordered, but use some other algorithmic ordering.
>>>>
>>>> Ideally there is full control over this. And should allow for both
>>> automated and manual ordering.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>    - How can feeds be transparent about what the sources are? Actors,
>>>>    search terms, hashtags, etc. What is coming into this feed? Can consumers
>>>>    inspect the sources?
>>>>
>>>> There should be full control over visibility.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>    - Is the feed replicable elsewhere?
>>>>
>>>> This brings up the idea of relays too, yes we should allow for
>>> duplication for both redundancy and handling workloads.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Chairs, I'd like to propose an agenda item to discuss this possibility
>>>> at the next CG meeting.
>>>>
>>> A meeting I would like to attend. Sorry I am not one for dealing with
>>> the pragmatic after mouth of prematurely set in stone standards, hence my
>>> absence from the process once I realized the reality of the protocol and
>>> its implications.
>>>
>>>> Evan
>>>>
>>> Aaron
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Aaron Gray - @AaronNGray@fosstodon.org | @aaronngray@threads.net |
>>> @AaronNGray@Twitter.com
>>>
>>> Meta-Mathematician, Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer
>>> Language Researcher and Designer, Type Theorist, Computer Scientist,
>>> Environmentalist and Climate Science Researcher and Disseminator.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Aaron Gray - @AaronNGray@fosstodon.org | @aaronngray@threads.net |
>> @AaronNGray@Twitter.com
>>
>> Meta-Mathematician, Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer
>> Language Researcher and Designer, Type Theorist, Computer Scientist,
>> Environmentalist and Climate Science Researcher and Disseminator.
>>
>>
>
> --
> https://snarfed.org/
>


-- 
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