SocialCG/2024-09-06

From W3C Wiki

September SocialCG Meeting 2024-09-06

https://meet.jit.si/social-web-cg

Present

Agenda

1. IP Protection Note Reminder:

  1. Anyone can participate in these calls. However, all substantive contributors to any CG Work Items must be members of the CG with full IPR agreements signed. https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/join
  2. To contribute to Work Items: ensure you have a W3 account: https://www.w3.org/accounts/request, and sign the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA): https://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/cla/
  1. Introductions & Re-Introductions
  2. Community Announcements
  3. TPAC Discussion / Plans
  4. Task Force Updates
    • Webfinger TF
    • HTTP Signatures TF
    • Portability TF
    • Forums and Threaded Discussions TF
    • End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) TF
    • AP Testing TF
  5. New Task Forces
    • Website Taskforce
    • Moderation / Trust & Safety taskforce
  6. AP issue 310 – Propose a ‘discover AP obj from HTML’ report?
  7. Potential WG Charter discussion
  8. Issue Processing

2. Intros

Eric Fassbender - Researcher in resistant exit. I have been talking to users leaving corporate social media for federated options. A major concern of theirs is privacy, so I am joining the community to learn more about how the protocol effects that

3. Community Announcements

Johannes: FediForum next week! 3 days this time, starting Thurs. Lots of demos in the pipeline, old and new. Lots of good topics proposed. Go to FediForum.org for a list of topics, etc. Let’s move the community forward.

Evan: My book from O’Reilly is being released on Sept 20! In its last rounds of edits.

Dmitri: TPAC in a few weeks! https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2024 We’ll have some Breakout sessions on Weds.

Tantek: Bunch of us, including myself, Tom, Johannes, etc, went to some Fediverse related meetups during XOXO Festival! Upcoming Homebrew Website Clubs, Front End Study Hall, and (hopefully) IndieWebCamp Berlin in November 9-10! https://events.indieweb.org/

4. TPAC Meeting Planning

Dmitri: We don’t have CG formoal meetings planned yet, but we’re planning on several Breakout sessions on Wednesday.

Tantek: W3C — World Wide Web Consortium, international standards body where companies and invited experts get together to work on web-related standards. Once a year they meet for an event called TPAC.

Wednesday of the week is the break-out day where overlapping standards can happen and where sessions are proposed on github, the proposals can be seen at the TPAC 2024 link above.

TPAC staff will look at the proposed sessions and try to sort out which happen when. You need a W3C account to register, the main event may need corporate-backed W3C account, but the breakout sessions should be available for all W3C account holders

What should we Social Web Incubator CG plan or propose to do during breakouts?

Dmitri: always good to meet, possible ideas for sessions

  • Update reports from the taskforces and groups we did
  • Evan mentioned interest in E2EE taskforce
  • Conversation about a potential Working Group to get revisions into the AP and AS2 specifications

Evan: great to discuss, but an issue we had at TPAC was that a lot of community members where excluded from participating due to not having corporate sponsors.

As for Taskforce Meetings, start doing a deep dive, talk about where we are and moving things forwards, for instance LOLA and pushing that forwards and the data portability.

Tantek: Great to have an in-person conversation about getting a Working Group setup again, but we need consensus on getting people involved. Potential deliverables: https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/WG_Charter_Discussion#Deliverables

Tantek: I would definitely support this conversation happening

Bob: Raises the question of “How can non-W3C members participate in the Working Group”

Dmitri: Two ways, petition your company to join the W3C so you can participate; two, you can be an invited expert and there’s a form to fill out for that. https://www.w3.org/invited-experts/

Coordination with the Community Group, and was proposed on the mailing discussion this week about that (link?), we can put in in the Coordination section of each charter we can add a requirement for close coordination with the CG

Johannes: Is there intent to … the google’s, meta’s, etc, and have a session specifically with them

Tantek: There was a discussion last time, and we were trying to find a way to have non-W3C members participate last time, and what a working group is “producing technical specifications” and what it’s not. We split some of that out into the “interest group”, which leads to Dmitri’s third point regarding how we involve participation. CG which leads into a WG for technical specification.

We approved anyone implementing specs to add those as Invited Experts.

To answer Johannes question about inviting folks to TPAC to a specific session, idea is a good one, but unless we have a specific breakout we plan for those companies, we wouldn’t expect them to show up, and that outreach would need to be done up front. I know that meta has expressed interest in participating again in SWICG meetings, which lead to Threads adopting AP.

Dmitri: Anything else? Questions? Breakout sessions?

Evan: I think there’s a hybrid model again this year, so it’s still possible to be part of these meetings.

Dmitri: Wednesday Sep 25, 2024 (Pacific timezone). Exact times forthcoming.

TallTed: There is a registration fee of $90 for TPAC remote meeting access. Register here — https://www.w3.org/register/tpac2024/form. Fee waiver is possible — https://www.w3.org/2024/09/TPAC/registration.html#waiver.

Tantek: Economic fee waiver should still be open, but if it’s not, contact Tantek to help file a request for a fee waiver.

5. Task Force Updates

Evan: I think we shut down the WebFinger and HTTPSig task forces last month, since they concluded work on the reports.

End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) Taskforce

Evan: We had a meeting in August, went over some architectural patterns we’ll use for the proposal, mechanism that runs over the AP network/protocol, to use AP as carrier. And then using an abstract existing well-tested protocol for the encryption and key management. There were 3 proposals: 1) OpenPGP standard, 2) Signal protocol, 3) MLS (Message Layer Security spec) I met with the Signal folks a few weeks ago, they asked for us to not use the protocol for a W3C spec. That leaves us with PGP and MLS. Breakout session at TPAC would be great.

Emelia: folks involved in lib Signal have been stymying the possibility of compiling LibSignal to WASM etc. Basically, they’re not interested in web environments.

Evan: It’s really great that they’re protecting their users in that way by defining what is and is not Signal™

Tantek: I have a proposal for the group – have Dmitri propose a SocialCG Breakout Session

PROPOSED: Submit a pull request for a SocialCG breakout session

RESOLVED: Partipants agreed

Tantek: we should make sure we put that on the agenda so remote participants can plan to get involved.

Discovery Task Force

Evan: Newest TF discussed last month is focused on Discovery of AP/social web features. Has a number of issues for discussion. Content negotiation, link headers, web finger, etc.

Things like “I’m looking at a web page, and would like to contact the author” or “want to ‘like’ this page on Fediverse” etc. Yes, the ‘rel=author’ topic is related, and will be included in the report.

Repository is up at: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-html-discovery

Tantek: I’m happy to help with rel=author and rel=me documentation.

Portability Taskforce

Dmitri: The taskforce had some discussion, but nothing to really report?

Forums and Threaded Discussions Taskforce

Meeting did not happen yesterday, cancelled. Will happen next week.

ActivityPub Testing Taskforce

(Not discussed?)

Misc

Aaron: I’m working on Calendar-related (iCalendar on AP type of thing) project, can anyone recommend FEPs or existing specs?

Evan: There’s some prior art for events & replying to events. There’s vocabs in AS2 for Events, accepting invitations, etc.

Aaron: Looking at it from the perspective of organising conferences, and potential for proposing events and creating a schedule for a website.

Dmitri: Other things to look at:

Tantek: Aaron, I’d support such an effort (of event management), and +1 on what Evan said about existing AP/AS2 event support. If you’re looking at what to send across the wire and interop, highly recommend to look at CalDav, it’s the most well-implemented and used protocol. (It’s what Apple vs Google calendar uses). If you’re looking for what a website should publish, I suggest you look at the h-event Microformats standard. Other things to look at: iCalendar format from IETF. Any Use Cases not covered would be interesting.

6. New Task Forces

Website Taskforce

Johannes: About two years ago, when I got reinvoled in the standards, the standard links to the activitypub.rocks website, which is badly out of date, and it links to a non-existing test suite. Makes bad impression for new implementors.

Johannes: The domain is controlled by Christine Lemmer-Webber. I met her at DWebCamp and discussed how the website can be kept up to date. Idea was that a TF is chartered under SWICG and that they take responsibility for ActivityPub.rocks content. Christine supports this approach if there is a resolution that a TF is being chartered to do this. So I’d like us to charter this new website TF.

Evan: I very much support this idea, however, I want to make sure we don’t run into it without our eyes open:

  • Do we have capacity within the group to work on this

Johannes: I have some time to work on it, to assemble a group and push it forwards and make it better than the current state of affairs

Evan: One thing that comes up frequently in the issue trackers are things like:

  • list of implementations
  • testing suites, basic needs of someone who wants to be an implementer

Dmitri: We’d need to move the website to the SWICG github org where we can start taking PRs and issues. Any objections?

Evan: If we have a web taskforce, it’d only be on activitypub.rocks, I have as2.rocks that I’d be happy to turn over to the taskforce.

Johannes: We should move slowly and make sure we produce some good results before taking on more work/

Tantek: Let’s add https://as2.rocks to that as well? Since it’s so closely related.

Emelia: would it be worth combining the two?

Tantek, Johannes: TF can decide

Johannes: re Bumblefudge’s earlier comment, it’d be great to unify how AP is presented on the Fedi, but that’s an enormous task, out of scope for now.

PROPOSAL: SocialCG starts up a Website Taskforce to update activitypub.rocks and as2.rocks (only). Bandwidth permitting. And set up a process for future updates.

RESOLVED: no objections, will move forwards.

Misc

Dmitri: We propose 2 more Breakout sessions at TPAC

PROPOSAL: Social Web Interoperability & Data Portability TPAC session. (RESOLVED) PROPOSAL: End-to-End-Encryption (E2EE) TPAC session. (RESOLVED)

Moderation / Trust & Safety taskforce

Emelia: currently, there’s some feature gaps regarding moderation, legality, flagging, that sort of thing. We’d want to avoid topics like domain blocks.

Evan: moderation is critical to the AP standard. I think a Trust/Safety/Moderation TF be hugely valuable. I’d expect a Trust & Safety Report be a deliverable, hopefully extensions to AS2/AP.

Emelia: yes, several deliverables, proposed extensions. As for writing a report about the limitations of Trust & Safety on the Fediverse, at the moment, I have a feeling that the work by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi recently, is that exact report.

Emelia: Meta have also expressed interest in the taskforce: https://www.threads.net/@andrs.svds/post/C_d-JxrMfI5

PROPOSAL: CG starts a Trust & Safety & Moderation TF. (Emelia volunteers to lead, would like assistance/other volunteers)

RESOLVED: no objections, will move forwards

End of Meeting

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