2017/ostatusbridge

OStatus Bridge was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2017.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/ostatusbridge
Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CKMED18UcU

Also see bridge#ActivityPub for the more formal/finalized description that came out of these notes.

When: 2017-06-24 16:00

Participants

Notes

OStatus or ActivityPub? AP is the future; OStatus has more adoption. Ideally both.

AJ wants Micropub-to-ActivityPub bridge. Would let Micropub clients talk to ActivityPub services.

Most major OStatus implementations also serve mf2. Mastodon, GNU Social, pump.io, Friendica. *Not* Diaspora.

https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network

Need to build

OStatus:

Webfinger => representative h-card
Salmon slaps => Webmentions
ActivityStreams 1 <=> microformats2 (or assume support, as mentioned above)
PuSH <=> h-feed reader (?)

ActivityPub:

ActivityPub => Webmention
ActivityStreams 2 (JSON-LD) => microformats2

URLs that everyone sees awill be http://proxy/..., which is a UX wart, but oh well.

Should we try to drive adoption in OStatus/AP implementations instead? Or hybrid? Takes little work to do hybrid, right? But need to drive adoption in all existing implentations *and* new ones, which gets to be a policy and political problem. Much more ideal, though. Should we try that instead?

Politics is so hard, communities are so entrenched. Similar to how we won't get silos to adopt Indieweb soon, we won't get IndieWeb and ActivityStreams camps to merge soon.

What if we allow both? If IW/OStatus sites add shims/endpoints that point to bridge, can have better UX. Specifically, get OStatus/AP sites to add link rels for IW protocols; get IW sites to serve JSON actor etc. blobs for home page based on content negotiation. If not, UX falls back to ugly bridge wrapper URLs.

Whiteboard

Summary

Johannes: It remains complicated.
AJ: Two concrete proposals.
1. Micropub => ActivityPub,
2. bridge with two modes, standalone and hybrid/assisted.
Sebastian: Ditto.
Ryan: Let's do it!