2021/Pop-ups/Microsub

Microsub 2021 was an IndieWebCamp Pop-ups 2021 session.

Summary

Let's work through and discuss some of the open issues on the Microsub spec issue tracker and find implementers.

Details

facilitator: David Shanske
Date: 2021-07-24
Time: 11:00 Pacific
event: https://events.indieweb.org/2021/07/microsub-popup-session-jjQzemcBDugp
Video: ▶️01:51:16s
hashtag: #microsub
https://etherpad.indieweb.org/microsub-popup

Participants

Notes

Archived from https://etherpad.indieweb.org/microsub-popup

Microsub is an early editor's draft. How do we move it to living standard? - Look at what has 2 publishers/consumers and whatever that is would be stable. Someone would have to do this.
How do we shift the paradigm to follow people, not feeds?
How does the spec do this? Feeds are a technical implementation.
- What could we do to standardize the user interaction to refocus?
- On the Publisher side, micro.blog assumes when you are following a person's micro.blog account you are following all of their feeds.
  - micro.blog lets you follow a domain name, and it picks one feed from their home page to follow
  - prefers jsonfeed, excludes wordpress comment feeds
- Spec could focus on entering h-card url and endpoint could figure out how to derive feeds from h-card.
- Could Microsub make recommendations to publishers to indicate which is a good "primary" feed to follow?
- Long question of how publishers mark up feeds to indicate what they are so Microsub can take those recommendations.
- Search parameter should be explained that it does not need to be a URL. But the results would not necessarily be feeds coming from a URL.
  - Aperture tries to turn search text into a URL. Yarns always assumes a URL.
  - Recommendation to have clients emphasize the author property of feeds over the URL.
  - Change URL in search to optionally opaque UID, so there is no representation of the feed URL in the search response.

How to Give a Microsub server access to private posts for its user(https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/1) - This is not strictly a Microsub issue, but there is a lot of interest. Assuming your Microsub endpoint is not tightly integrated with other endpoints, there needs to be some way to either pass info to it, or for the Microsub to request it. - Tabled, possibly for IndieAuth session

Feed and Item Metadata
- Indicating Item Source(https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/13) -
  - Be able to add unfollow button.
  - Possible options
    - _source UID - already implemented by Aperture but was not recalled
    - Top level item in return with the sources and each item could only have the ID
    - _source with UID plus name/photo optionally also URL for clicking
  - Discussion results https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/13#issuecomment-886101131
- Multiple Authors https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/38 - Make author an array in spec?
  - Retweets are in a way multi-author posts...
  - Academic articles
- Have Editable Feed Names and Other Feed Metadata(https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/23)
Channel Method to include all Sources(https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/44)
- Add parameters discussion to issue, allow query for 1 specific channel, and allow optional return of sources.
- In some cases, it may not make sense for endpoint to return the sources.
- https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/44#issuecomment-886102612
Retrieve Feeds Individually(https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/21)
- Allow source as property in the action=timeline is stable enough to go into spec.
Adopt Standardized Format for Errors into Spec (https://github.com/indieweb/microsub/issues/28)
- Requires examples of implementation.
Idea to be added to issues....ask for alternative feeds for the source, in the event you want to find different types, and then update an existing source. This could be done only on the server side as well.
- Search/Follow/Unfollow should accept either URL or _id

Next steps:

Check on implementation status of all features in the spec to determine which features can be considered stable/core
Implement things we promised during this session

Interest

Add your +1 for interest in this topic:

Tantek Çelik — I’d like to discuss re-orienting Microsub around people (h-cards) rather than / beyond / before feeds (h-feed, etc.)
Manton Reece
Marty McGuire
Angelo Gladding
David Shanske
Jacky Alciné
Maxwell Joslyn
Aaron Parecki
Jamie Tanna - +1 on people not feeds, I'd be especially interested in linking Micropub's q=contact for discovery of people / have some way of linking different social platforms, so we can have i.e. a "friends" group that follows site / social media from the same interface
David Somers [omz13]
Add yourself here… (see this for more details)