👋 Hey y’all yarners 🤗 – @darch@neotxt.dk and I have been discussing in our Weekly Yarn.social call (still ongoing… come join us! 🙏) about the experimental Yarn.social <-> Activity Pub integration/bridge I’ve been working on… And mostly whether it’s even a good idea at al, and if we should continue or not?

There are still some outstanding issues that would need to be improved if we continued this regardless

Some thoughts being discussed:

• Yarn.social pods are more of a “family”, where you invite people into your “home” or “community”
  
• Opening up to the “Fedivise” is potentially “uncontrolled”
  
• Even at a small scale (a tiny dev pod) we see activities from servers never interacted with before
  
• The possibility of abuse (because basically anything can POST things to your Pod now)
  
• Pull vs. Push model polarising models/views which whilst in theory can be made to work, should they?
  

Go! 👏

I don’t like where this is going with a push-model like Activity Pub being mixed up with yarn social. Activity Pub might be all for freedom of speech, but with the issue that @prologic@twtxt.net outline the is a real potential of it turning into freedom of shouting.

What I really like about twtxt is that is based on a principle of freedom to listen where you can chose who to follow and are not force-fed someone else’s agenda, that you don’t care about or want to deal with.

@darch@neotxt.dk I really like the distinction made here between:

Freedom of speech / Freedom to shout

Basically every other social media platform really. All centralised ones like Facebook, Twitter, etc, and push-based ones fall into this category too 👌

Where what we have built with Yarn.social / Twtxt is really:

Freedom to listen

Where we have full control of what we “pull”, or not (Follow/Unfollow). I also like what we were talking about in the call where we describe the interactions as:

I write something down on paper, and post it outside my mailbox/house.
Someone drives by and reads it and is intuiged.
That someone then writes down their own thoughts and replies on their own paper and posted it by their mailbox.
You come along and see it one day, and decide to further erply.

In this way Yarn / Twtxt is much slower, but that’s by design.

@prologic@twtxt.net to be fair, I don’t really see a difference here: with the integration, users still only see the feeds they choose to read (either as a twtxt or AP), right? Or this is more a problem of the integration making the network “grow too fast”?

@marado@twtxt.net Well, the reality is that you cannot actually control this too well. Because of the push model of Activity Pub you have to a) trust that the servers you are interacting with are both correct and not malicious and b) have to send Undo+Follow activities to actors you no longer want to follow (missing right now)

Problem that I’ve found in practise however is that even for a tiny pod (used for development) I’m seeing interacting with servers I never interacted with (ever).

In other words, choosing to follow an actor does not follow the same model as Yarn/Twtxt does, where we then decide to “fetch” their feed. In fact it’s the other way around, you end up telling server X that you’re interested in actor Y, and servers X will then “push” stuff back to you. You can see how this can lead to some of the infamous DoS behaviours that can occur in the wild 🤣

And mostly whether it’s even a good idea at al, and if we should continue or not?

I think that activitypub in yarn is a great feature! And also one of the easier ones to set up and get going.
And as I said last week - I think it’s a important features - and will drive adoption.
It is optional as well - so if one does not want it - just not turn that feature on.

I personally was missing the fact that I could not easily follow others before you added activitypub, but now I can choose to follow them, which is great.

It is optional as well - so if one does not want it - just not turn that feature on.

If we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks and accept that differences (even though we’ll do our best to bridge the gaps) – we’ll have to make “Enabling” / “Disabling” an actual thing. being an experimental feature flag is not enough, feature flags are designed to be short-lived until promoted, or decided against.

The question then becomes more along the lines of:

• Do we want a toggle for Activity Pub at the Pod level? (I assume yes)
  
• Do we want a toggle for Activity Pub discovery at the User level?

@prologic@twtxt.net I see: I was speaking in the end user’s perspective tho, I suppose those concerns only really affect the pod owner? And, if that is the case, giving a pod owner the ability to toggle AP integration on/off us probably good enough to mitigate those concerns?

I’m worried that Yarn will become just another ActivityPub frontend. This integration threatens to split the community in two. Users of Twtxt clients without ActivityPub support won’t want to follow Yarn users because they’ll be engaged in conversations that are inaccessible to standard Twtxt clients. It will only force the split deeper if ActivityPub is an option to be toggled by users or pod operators.

@mckinley@twtxt.net This is true actually and you are 100% right