Taskforce Meeting 2024-11-12

[ThisIsMissEm]

Mailing list notice: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2024Nov/0031.html

Agenda:

1. IP Protection Note Reminder:
   • Anyone can participate in these calls. However, all substantive contributors to any Taskforce Work Items must be members of the Social Web CG with full IPR agreements signed. https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/join
   • 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/
2. Reminder of Code of Conduct
3. Introductions & Overview
4. Meeting times and cadence
   • Proposal: Every two weeks at 5pm CET on Tuesdays
5. Defining and agreeing on Scope of Work for the Taskforce
   • Proposal: Initially work on items related to long-standing federation issues:
     • formalizing Flag activities ( Improve Flag activities to include the categorisation of the report #2, Improve Flag activities to differentiate the object being reported vs the evidence for that report #3, Formally define the Flag activity for sending reports #14, Idea: stable, opaque identifiers for originator of Flag activities #8 )
     • discovery of moderation group actors ( Addressing for moderation activities #24 )
     • content warnings / labeling, as to move away from misusing summary on Note ( Define a property for Content Warnings #1, Idea: Annotations / Labeling of content #4 )
     • define Block activity handling / sending for S2S, currently only defined for C2S ( Define/document how blocking works in S2S #23 )
     • communicating updates and conversations relating to Flag activities ( Idea: Ability to allow moderators to communicate with each other #6, Idea: Ability to communicate updates in relation to Flag activities #7 )
     • Explicitly out of scope, but we can include a recommendation in our report(s) about these if necessary:
       • federation management, i.e., FediBlock, since "instances" are not a thing in ActivityPub, but just a side-effect of S2S.
       • quote posts (has existing FEPs)
       • reply controls (has existing FEPs / implementations)

[lisad]

I love this scope of work. Where would you slot in, if anywhere, work on sharing moderator decisions? Blocklist sharing exists in practice, does it need work for interoperability or better functionality?

[evanp]

Core ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 issues are not in scope for this task force. We have an existing process for working on them.

It would be a good idea to stay focused on building extension vocabularies and interfaces with other protocols.

[ThisIsMissEm]

I love this scope of work. Where would you slot in, if anywhere, work on sharing moderator decisions? Blocklist sharing exists in practice, does it need work for interoperability or better functionality?

@lisad for now, I'm wanting to keep this out of scope, as just federating Block(actor) activities isn't well defined, and "instances" aren't a thing in ActivityPub, we just have Actors who happen to share the same domain. So I don't think we can do anything around this at present. If we're talking blocklists of actors, then those could just be regular Collections today, and then you'd need some way to subscribe to them and get data.

[ThisIsMissEm]

Core ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 issues are not in scope for this task force. We have an existing process for working on them.

It would be a good idea to stay focused on building extension vocabularies and interfaces with other protocols.

@evanp I'm not sure what you mean by this comment. Is there a specific item that you're against us working on?

[evanp]

It would be a good idea to stay focused on building extension vocabularies and interfaces with other protocols.

@evanp I'm not sure what you mean by this comment. Is there a specific item that you're against us working on?

Well, I think if you work on further elaboration of the Flag activity, it would be a good idea to keep it compatible to what's already in the Activity Vocabulary.

Otherwise, I'm glad to see how many of these items are for building out new vocabularies. That's the right way to move forward! 👍🏼

[evanp]

One great bit might be going through the "needs FEP" issues on ActivityPub and AS2 to see if there are any that would fit in scope and benefit from attention.

[ThisIsMissEm]

It would be a good idea to stay focused on building extension vocabularies and interfaces with other protocols.

@evanp I'm not sure what you mean by this comment. Is there a specific item that you're against us working on?

Well, I think if you work on further elaboration of the Flag activity, it would be a good idea to keep it compatible to what's already in the Activity Vocabulary.

Otherwise, I'm glad to see how many of these items are for building out new vocabularies. That's the right way to move forward! 👍🏼

If you currently, today, use Flag activities per AS2, you will often find your reports not actually filed, due to specific requirements from various software. I think it's within scope of this task force to both document how Flag is currently used, write FEPs for new properties (evidence for example) and delivery semantics that we would recommend when sending Flag activities (e.g., currently they're unaddressed activities sent to the reported actor's inbox, which is almost certainly incorrect).

[ThisIsMissEm]

@evanp on AP there's only really these two:

• Disable replies w3c/activitypub#319
• Community notes w3c/activitypub#464

And maybe w3c/activitypub#406 at a stretch

On AS2, there's

• Issuing updates related to Flag Activities? w3c/activitystreams#609 (already covered above)
• Appropriately defined properties for Content Warnings and Content Labels w3c/activitystreams#583 (also already covered above)

I think 319 on AP is out of scope, since others are working on that (GoToSocial just implemented something), and 464 is probably far-future scope (though I do have a prototype of a Web Annotations server setup that I think could work for doing community notes)

[ThisIsMissEm]

Some reading materials mentioned during the meeting:

• Fediverse Governance Report, specifically on inter-server admin communications: https://fediverse-governance.github.io/#8.-inter-server-admin-comms
• W3C TAG's document on Privacy Principles: https://www.w3.org/TR/privacy-principles/#protecting-web-users-from-abusive-behaviour

[ThisIsMissEm]

Pull request for the meeting notes: #34

[ThisIsMissEm]

@evanp did my comment in #26 (comment) cover everything that you thought could be brought across from the AP and AS2 issue trackers? I believe we already have issues open for each other those points apart from the Delete Acknowledgements one.