1J/ Mastadon to Protocols / Dmitri Z, @bengo

Session 1J

Mastodon and Protocols

Session Convener: @bengo

Notes-taker(s):

Tags / links to resources / technology discussed, related to this session:

https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

IIW Mastodon + Protocols

Dmitri: Intro. We met in SocialWG Ben: Mastodon DMs aren’t encrypted.

@bengo: I’ve given some talks about Mastodon and ActivityPub

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c17gjxEoyMQ
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWfqV_adW54

Round of intros and ‘why are you here’?

Mastodon

• Lots of friction signing up and trying servers
• Maybe hello could help people move from twitter to mastodon by just clicking through
• e.g. some servers have approval processes
• Link social accounts to proof you’re not a bot
• The people you follow, where are they on Mastodon?

• Why there are so many points of friction is a byproduct of the standardization process being hard.
• SocialWG made intentional (if unfortunate) decision to ‘punt on’ “Security” on ActivityPub
• Ben: I wish the spec said ‘you should use oidc’ but the conmpromise was ‘you may use oauth2’
• We could talk about browser
• Implement Webfinger
• Mastodon has prepended ‘@bengo@mastodon.social’ often. Web finger is acct:bengo@mastodon.social or acct:bengoering@gmail.com
• Authentication often means login with password means there is a password hash in a database somewhere
• dmitri: instances are needed for auth/authz. But also for moderation. On you instance you can see the ‘local timeline’ which are people on your instance.
• What are the pinpoints that prevent people from leaving twitter?
  • The cold start problem. Empty village problem.
  • Cross domain user search is hard
  • e.g. multiple beings across many domains
  • At-mentioning your friends
  • Which servers out there have the hash of this email address as my friends
• n user land, everyone add to your twitter bio your activitypub actor id
• Debirdify is a tool where you oauth into mastodon and twitter and it helps you find your twitter followees on the fediverse
• What are the incentives for a twitter account to receive their twitter followers? (e.g. as they try to emigrate to fediverse)
• People need to tweet or update their profile on twitter.com to point to their new activitypub actor
• How do I find friends in general if they’re not on twitter and never have?
• Phone books have this problem too
• What is private set intersection?
  • Signal does this for contact discovery, but it could be even better by adding some more consent
  • Secure multi party computing algorithms that can be used to help find the mutual friends you have with someone else, without disclosing to that friend all your other friends they don’t know
  • GitHub doesn’t do this but does something kinda similar with bloom filters
• Miskey calckey foundkey - use typescript
• We need better protocols for what should happen when a mastodon instance needs to shut down (e.g. operator can’t afford it anymore) e.g. mastodon.technology
• joyce: It’s really hard to get on mastodon. But once you’re there you’re with the people who care. Doc learned this sharing a post across mastodon as well as traditional social networks
• We’re still in hobbyist and bbs days of instance moderation. It’s early in the fediverse.
• We’re still in the land of individual