I was feeling left out, but I finally got some of that Mastodon spam I've been hearing about.
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decentralisation (16 out of 46)
- A tightly scoped charter, focussed on "maintenance" of (errata and clarifications) the ActivityPub and ActivityStreams 2.0 specifications alone.
- A set of criteria for selection of two or three co-chairs of the group (see eg. this self-review draft from csarven). The W3C Team ultimately nominates chairs, but we can make recommendations to them, and I'd advocate for their decision making process and rationale to be completely transparent.
- A set of criteria which Invited Experts should meet. We should enable people who have stewarded communities and moderated instances in the fediverse or similar to participate, as well as current implementers, and implementers who plan to integrate AP into exisiting software in future. We should make the criteria as open and inclusive as possible so we have a meaningfully diverse set of voices in the group; and it will also help us to transparently justify every group participant, and help others understand the perspective each person brings.
- A clear process for individuals to self-nominate as IEs. Ultmiately the chair(s) decide who can join as an IE, and it's always a worry that they approve people they know and reject people they don't. If we have a clear set of criteria, then people who are not known to someone on the "inside" can apply on solid ground and feel secure that their application is considered on its own merits.
- A clear participation process. We should know when a meeting is "quorate", how we make decisions (in more detail than "consensus"), and enable async participation in decision-making as much as possible.
- A clear, documented line of communication/coordination between the WG and the CG. There will certainly be membership overlap, but someone(s) explicitly responsible for feeding information in each direction will be important.
- Everywhere we fucking look we have ads and paywalls. See: media streaming services, the cinema, print newspapers and magazines...
- Please, I beg you, go involve yourself in some kind of co-operative, collective, mutual aid, community organisation, literally anything that isn't just transaction/exploitation based, and consider that maybe there are other ways to exist.
- Attended my first TAG meetings. Only slept through one. (As in my alarm didn't go off, not that it was boring.)
- Chaired a Social Web Incubator CG meeting, and thought about SocialCG admin a lot.
- Had way too many meetings in general this week. 18 hours, 5 minutes and 9 seconds to be precise.
- Did manage to get out for a walk to Kinghorn Loch though.
- Crocheted a neko.
- Made a fruitcake, among other things.
- Made a no-recipe chocolate peanutbutter pie with a nut crust, that went surprisingy well.
- Went for a run, in the rain.
- Did some DID stuff.
- Celebrated an intense week with Friday night takeaway pizza.
- Finished Fullmetal Alchemist. Started Carnival Row.
- Watched Sputnik (pretty good?) and Ghosts of War (not good).
TPAC 2023
I was on the fence about attending TPAC right from when the idea first entered my head, to the journey there. I'm glad I went though. It was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and colleagues from the web standards world, and to meet some wonderful new people as well.
The covid precautions taken by the organisers reassured me a lot. It was a four to five hundred person conference, with attendees from all over the world. In spite of relaxed standards taken across most of the rest of the world at this point, we stayed masked, ate outside, and they handed out as many tests as people needed to encourage testing every day. I know a few people who tested positive early on, and attended remotely from their hotel rooms; I hope everyone was so considerate. Last I heard there were a handful of cases reported, and a week later I've avoided it. While wearing masks during a heatwave in Spain for five days running was uncomfortable, I'm glad these were the requirements and I think it was worthwhile. I probably wouldn't have attended without this.
The food was rubbish though; apparently consistently for everyone, not only the vegans :)
The first two days were the most exhausting, and I used up pretty much all of my energy upfront.
I attended the Social CG meeting. I went to the AC meeting, and sat on stage for a TAG panel. I was anxious about this the whole time, as I had carefully arranged my life to avoid public speaking since I left academia, and don't do well thinking on the spot in front of a crowd. Fortunately none of the questions were about anything I had a strong opinion on, so nobody was expecting to hear from me in particular.
I didn't attend many breakouts as I had a few co-op meetings to fit in. I did join the Privacy Task Force breakout, which was a completely packed room, and a surprisingly (sorry, perhaps I'm too cynical) positive discussion. Seems like we're on a good track with the Privacy Principles (though much editorial work remains that I'm on the hook for but not on top of).
At various points I sat in on the RDF Canonicalization and Verifiable Credentials WG meetings. I'm a bit out of the loop, and these meetings were not quite enough to get back into it, but tensions seem high as various pieces of work near completion. I felt like everyone in that room is well overdue a holiday.
In between all of this I spent time in the "hallway track", having excellent conversations.
I was so happy I got to spend time with half of the TAG (Dan, Hadley, Tess, Sangwhan, Lea); as well as Evan, Tantek, Arnaud, Brent, Joe, Juan, Michiel, Amy, Sam, ... ; and Dmitri and Manu however briefly. I also made some amazing new connections, including Lola, Elena, and a bunch of people from Igalia who I was keen to talk about co-ops with. There were plenty of people there I wish I could have managed to see more of, too.
It was an intense week, and I haven't really looked at my email since, but I suspect I have a lot of things to follow up on. I took the scenic route back, via Morocco and Gibraltar, in an attempt to decompress before my whole-co-op meeting next week...
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Social Web Incubator Community Group - face-to-face meeting at TPAC 2023
The Social Web CG meeting featured old faces and new. I hadn't looked at the agenda beforehand, and Evan seemed keen to focus on practical things and make it a working meeting. I think it's tricky to balance this at TPAC, where many curious observers without necessarily deep background sit in, and it's harder for the usual community members to attend (remote is an option, and technically anyone could just dial in, but it's theoretically gated behind a registration, which again, has an option to ask for the fee to be waived, but does imply that most people should have a paid ticket). It turned out that the audio in the room was not great too, so remote participants had trouble taking part. I minuted it here.
Some of the interactions gave me a tight-chested panicky feeling, a throwback to five or more years ago when I was deeply involved in this space, emotionally invested, and having a hard time dealing with all of the conflict. Time constraints aside, I'm hesitant to get more than peripherally involved again for this reason, though I do want to see the work progress. Thoughts about rechartering the Social WG have been floating around for a while, and we had the first minuted conversation about it. There is a lot of enthusiasm for it from the W3C side - it would be a shame to lose the momentum currently in the fediverse, when we could use it to fix up at least the ActivityPub standard. Meanwhile there's a diversity of projects and spinoffs in a community that's so large I can't keep up, and people there are naturally worried about being excluded. I think this is a combination of people who weren't around for the first time, and see it as an exclusive group that only reps of large companies can be involved with, along with people who were there for the first time round and had some bad experiences with the difficult group dynamics, and are not keen to see that repeated.
Personally, I'm not opposed to a WG rechartering, but I'm not strongly advocating for it either. I carry the concern of the latter group, and take seriously the worries about exclusion. W3C process can be completely opaque to most people, and even when they are inclusive on paper (eg. Invited Experts don't need to be part of a W3C member company) this opaqueness as well as tribal knowledge and strongly held assumptions by "insiders" can similarly cause exclusion.
To mitigate this, I think it's safe to charter a continuation of the Social Web WG when we have:
It typically takes ages to get a WG chartered, although I think there's a sense in W3C that this could happen (relatively) quickly for the Social Web, as it's a continuation of an existing group. The biggest impediment are the hangups in the community, old and new, and the emotional reactions people have when they're in disagreement. I get it - I've been there, and still have the scars - but ultimately a majority of potential participants are striving for the same goal, and I really hope there's enough unity in that. Many of us have been burnt, or burned out, but it's a different world now than it was in 2016-2018. We can do things differently.
The disagreements are broadly between people who are doing work as well, who all have opinions and experiences that should be weighted heavily. I understanding wanting to just get stuff done but the price of this shouldn't be ignoring people with a different perspective. I understand having serious concerns, but these can and should be a constructive way of improving the situation for everyone, not stop-energy or a weapon. I hope we can slow down just enough to hear each other, but not so much that we spin our wheels forever. It's a tricky line to walk.
I don't know how involved I'll be. I've already borne witness to public and private blowups about this in the week since the meeting and I don't have a place for that energy in my life. On the other hand, if we can get some more cooperative and inclusive dynamics in place, I'd be more inclined to spend some time.
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I'm very tired* of the assumption that the Web needs advertising in some form to continue to exist as a widely accessible service. I will not accept this false dichotomy of ads or paywalls.
* tired in the sense of exhausted and weary, and also in the sense of mind-numbingly bored by.
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On fediverse culture
I was recently asked about "fediverse culture" - whether there's one, or many? Where the technology stops and the culture starts? I have turned my reply into this not-very-refined blog post.
The short answer, in my opinion, is that there is definitely no universal culture on the fediverse.
There are certainly lots of people who have ideas about what the "fediverse" is or should be. Note that the fediverse is not Mastodon alone; Friendica and GNU Social also interoperate with Mastodon to degrees, and that there are different frontends for Mastodon available that might impact how people feel about their community and interact with the system(s). And other non-twitter like sites that also interoperate - peertube, pleroma, pixelfed - and that very small customisations to the normal Mastodon software done by server admins can have an impact on the usage and expectations of that server. And I'm just talking about the UI here really, not even moderation tools/rules. That's a whole nother blogpost/thesis.
For example: when I joined toot.cat, many thousands of years ago, the UI was customised to read "boop" and "bap" (or something) instead of "toot" and "boost". It was my first time on a mastodon instance (pre-ActivityPub, can you imagine?!). I posted something like "what is the difference between bap and a boost" and had a lot of responses from people on other servers along the lines of "what are you on about". Only people on the toot.cat instance understood, and as a new user I didn't know that every other server did not present the same experience. It's a tiny example, but scale that up across thousands of different UIs, norms, and contexts.
That line between technology and culture; I posit: no such thing! I find this whole thing absolutely fascinating, and tried to write about it in my thesis, but it was more of an afterthought than a focus at the time. Thinking about the circular relationship between UX and human behaviour - how they shape each other. The affordances of the system determine certain usage patterns, but people subvert those affordances, turn them to unexpected ends, and the system is often changed (if not directly by the designers, then indirectly through reinterpretation by the users) as a result.
I don't see how there could possibly be anything like a uniform culture across the fediverse. There isn't a uniform culture on twitter, and everyone is using more or less the same UIs/apps to interact with it. Anyone who says there is is actually just describing the part of it they've experienced - which might be significant - but there's no way it's "all" of it.
Related tangent: Most of the focus in terms of development has been on the federation - server-to-server APIs. Which is all well and good, but I've always been more interested in the implications of standard client-to-server APIs. Mastodon doesn't implement the ActivityPub client-to-server last time I checked, which hampers my dream. The dream: is as many options for your posting apps as there are for todo list apps, or, I dunno, raincoats. Posting clients would fall along the spectrum from highly specialised (do one thing - eg. individual photo sharing - and do it well) to very generic, and along the spectrum of highly personalised for your specific context to super generic everyone's is the same. We have a lot of options for raincoats, from really fancy high tech water repellent ones, to basic plastic ponchos, to ones that are cosy and warm, to ones that keep the wind off best or are lightweight and optimised for hiking, and you can usually get them all in a range of colours and sizes, but they're all recogniseable as raincoats. Federation in that world is to me extremely exciting - it probably opens up a lot more questions than answers, but I'd love to see how it played out. It would necessitate 'reader' applications (whether or not these are integrated into posting applications) to be a lot more able to gracefully handle post formats they weren't specialised in (fortunately(?) we have standards to help), which probably mostly means being able to fall back on a plain text representation for everything as a minimum.
I'd love it to be normal and everyday to not assume that when you post a message on your social network, every person is reading it in a similar UI, either to the one you posted from, or to the one everyone else is reading it in.
I love it because it embodies the fact that everyone really is operating from a different perspective, in a different context, a different mood, with a different set of life experiences, than everyone else. I see a lot of people forgetting this when they're discussing/arguing about stuff in general (in 'normal' life, not even web standards!) and find it uniquely frustrating.
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TAG nomination statement
My two year term on the W3C TAG has flown by, and it's election time again. If you're a W3C AC representative, you can vote here (link restricted to AC reps) or read all of the candidate nomination statements here. Please consider ranking me favourably!
I grew up alongside the Web, and have never known the world without it. Early tinkering with HTML and CSS shaped the course of my life and became a formative part of how I interacted with the world. It is deeply important to me to see the Web move forward as a positive force, and to push back against the surveillance, manipulation, and abuse that are routine across many parts of the Web today.
The TAG has a great record over recent years of promoting security, privacy, and accessibility as core parts of Web architecture. I have spent my efforts during my two years as a member of the TAG pushing to go above and beyond these foundations; as a member of the TAG's Privacy Task Force, as well as editor of the draft Societal Impacts Questionnaire. I intend to continue enabling and encouraging specification authors and implementers to consider the broader consequences of their work in the context of a global web which is part of an enormous and ever-changing landscape of cultural norms, legislation, and innovation.
I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, with a visiting year at MIT. My thesis builds on my personal experiences with online communities; I researched self-expression on the Web and how interconnected social and technical systems support or impede online interactions. At the same time, I helped shape the future of the social Web through co-editing and implementing several specifications of the W3C Social Web Working Group, including the ActivityPub specification which has seen recent attention due to a surge in public interest in decentralised social networks. I also spent a year and a half as the Working Group's Team Contact, which familiarised me with W3C processes and politics.
I spent the years since developing software to support openness and transparency for public good. I have worked with investigative journalists and open data activists, facilitating the efforts of civil society groups, governments, and the private sector internationally. I continue this work as a Director of Open Data Services Co-operative, building and maintaining tools that use the Web to promote civic use of data and fight corruption worldwide. I also work with Digital Bazaar on Web standards related to decentralisation, with the goal of enabling a foundational layer of technologies to support individual agency on the Web.
These experiences at the intersection of civic work and cutting edge standards development give me a unique perspective for my time on the TAG. There is no need for trade-offs between participation and privacy, or between community and autonomy, when building empowering Web technologies. My strengths lie in listening to input from a range of perspectives, discerning the common grounds on which to move forwards, and turning consensus into concrete specification text.
Should my term be renewed, I will continue to advocate for thoughtful and intentional design of web platform features which account for diverse perspectives and usage scenarios, as well as bringing this mindset to specification design reviews.
Find me at rhiaro.co.uk.
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I'm seeing a lot of mixing up ActivityPub with Mastodon/implementation details and I keep almost replying but managing not to. Deep breaths. I'm much happier when I keep my head down and stick to foraging mushrooms and sitting quietly on the beach.
I think it's mostly just the novelty that so many people are talking about ActivityPub at all tbh.
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Lots of people I know from not online and also not web standards world are starting to show up on mastodon which is really exciting but also quite strange?!
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Starting to discover that one of the things I liked in particular about my mastodon feed(s) is that it wasn't full of the same people as twitter. But as I see people I follow on twitter moving over, I have to follow them via mastodon because I don't necessarily want to lose them, but don't have the headspace to sort things out properly right now.
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As of this week, previously 'public' facebook pages seem to be behind a login wall. I can't check the menu for my local Indian takeaway, see which stalls are on the market this week, or get a clue about things happening in the community around me.
I can't find anyone talking about this online, and the only thing anyone - even local biz owners - seem to be able to say to me is *shrug*. What the fuck.
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Now I want to get more involved in my local community, not having a facebook account is becoming debilitating. I hate this! Well, it was always a problem when travelling too, but I was less invested in stuff then.
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B*tco*n people are all like 'revolutionising the economy' and in the next breath 'have fun staying poor' like these people don't want to revolutionise shit they want to keep the status quo but with themselves in charge.
(yeah yeah Not All B*tco*n People, I know, but seriously, huge swathes of this community are just absolute garbage.)
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Week in review: 11th - 17th Jan
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We had a nice Social CG meeting during which we talked about the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals - a lightweight process for collaborating on new features for decentralised Web things. (Oh and also I'm a co-chair now.)
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A federated galaxy of community platforms, tailored for the specific human communities that use them and linked by Google-like sites that facilitate discovery, would be a more functional internet for many people, and would also decentralize the social web.
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It's easy, tempting even, for us decentralisation / free software nerds to say ha! Serves you right. But most people who depend on bigtech never had any meaningful choice in the matter. A great many people are working to change that.
If you're inspired today to look for alternatives to google services, check out ethical.net.
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