* ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences
@ 2024-04-28 17:58 Eric Wong
2025-01-14 20:27 ` Eric Wong
2025-01-18 17:40 ` Ben Zanin
0 siblings, 2 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Eric Wong @ 2024-04-28 17:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: meta
I've been looking into AP off and on over the last year.
While the technical side is certainly feasable,
I'm not sure how to deal with the cultural differences...
* AP allows limited HTML, sometimes sourced from Markdown;
but <img> tags seem supported by all implementations.
Even snac2 (a minimalist AP implementation packaged for
Debian) supports images :<
I expect the public-inbox audience would be repulsed by
needless use of HTML and images in AP messages if they
get mirrored to mailing lists...
Mirroring + displaying user-supplied images or video isn't
acceptable to me for legal and mental health reasons. Not
to mention the cost of storing these things (especially in
git).
* line wrapping: mail users typically expect wrapping at
a reasonable line length (e.g. 64-72 columns), and this
is expected for git commit messages (and code) by most
projects.
AP (and some MUAs) expect the device to wrap, too; but
it's probably not welcomed by most mailing list users.
* Emojis - ugh, at least Perl has charnames::viacode in the
standard library to ASCII-fy undisplayable glyphs for terminals.
I ended up cloning over 200MB of emoji graphics just to read
the Python code for a JS-free AP implementation designed for
low-power devices...
* Post vs Note - AP makes a distinction between Posts and Notes,
with the latter being more casual (I think). Emails don't have
this distinction, but perhaps SSIA (Subject Says It All)
emails would qualify as a Note.
* Quoting - seems like mainly an email thing, but I really don't
see the point of quoting anymore given the existence of reliable
and easily-mirrored public archives. It's also a waste of storage,
bandwidth and Xapian index space.
* Signatures - they're a waste of space in email, so I'm glad
they don't seem to be a thing in AP.
Maybe some other things, too...
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* Re: ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences
2024-04-28 17:58 ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences Eric Wong
@ 2025-01-14 20:27 ` Eric Wong
2025-01-18 17:40 ` Ben Zanin
1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Eric Wong @ 2025-01-14 20:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: meta
Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:
> I've been looking into AP off and on over the last year.
> While the technical side is certainly feasable,
> I'm not sure how to deal with the cultural differences...
Fwiw, many of these are a problem with emails, too...
> * AP allows limited HTML, sometimes sourced from Markdown;
<snip>
At least indexing of HTML and attachments should be user/admin
configurable (pick from dozens of HTML -> text converters). I
have PDFs in some personal (lei) emails that could be indexed,
as well...
Basically we could do what Xapian omindex or recoll do for
indexing various attachments (EXIF metadata, etc.).
> * line wrapping: mail users typically expect wrapping at
> a reasonable line length (e.g. 64-72 columns), and this
> is expected for git commit messages (and code) by most
> projects.
>
> AP (and some MUAs) expect the device to wrap, too; but
> it's probably not welcomed by most mailing list users.
I'm thinking of giving an option to use Text::Wrap on the
server side, but that hurts cache-ability...
> * Emojis - ugh, at least Perl has charnames::viacode in the
> standard library to ASCII-fy undisplayable glyphs for terminals.
> I ended up cloning over 200MB of emoji graphics just to read
> the Python code for a JS-free AP implementation designed for
> low-power devices...
Given emojis seem to be showing up in "plain-text" mails over
the years, I'm thinking our current HTML display should offer
the option to use charnames::viacode due to workaround glyph
limitations on smaller systems.
Downside: more display options hurt cache-ability.
> * Post vs Note - AP makes a distinction between Posts and Notes,
<snip>
> * Quoting - seems like mainly an email thing, but I really don't
> see the point of quoting anymore given the existence of reliable
> and easily-mirrored public archives. It's also a waste of storage,
> bandwidth and Xapian index space.
I still absolutely detest excessive quoting since it wastes
precious screen space and requires more scrolling. I have
a key bound in mutt to quickly skip quotes (it's also possible
to completely hide/unhide them with a single key) but there's
no placeholder either, so it's a little jarring.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* Re: ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences
2024-04-28 17:58 ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences Eric Wong
2025-01-14 20:27 ` Eric Wong
@ 2025-01-18 17:40 ` Ben Zanin
1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Ben Zanin @ 2025-01-18 17:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: meta, Eric Wong
Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> writes:
> I've been looking into AP off and on over the last year.
> While the technical side is certainly feasable,
> I'm not sure how to deal with the cultural differences...
[snip]
> Maybe some other things, too...
I'm interested in the idea of public-inbox mirroring ActivityPub
conversations too!
One difficulty that might belong in both the technical and cultural
differences buckets is post editing. Most AP users have an expectation
that remote servers will honour actions that edit existing posts,
including edits which delete the original post. (Yes, newsgroups have
cancel posts, kind of, but email mostly lacks such a technical feature
so it never really developed cultural expectations around remote servers
politely acting on these requests.)
I think this issue is worth thinking about how to navigate and I'm glad
to see you giving voice to your thought process here on the list, thank
you for doing that.
--
Ben
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
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2024-04-28 17:58 ActivityPub vs email - cultural differences Eric Wong
2025-01-14 20:27 ` Eric Wong
2025-01-18 17:40 ` Ben Zanin
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).