2019/sots

 State of the Suite (of Protocols)  was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2019.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/sots

IndieWeb Summit 2019 Session: State of the Suite (of Protocols) When: 2019-06-29 15:15

Participants

 * Mime
 * Nadreck
 * Don Park
 * Katie
 * Katie

Introductions

 * Mime: has been doing indieweb work for a long time. Currently working on sort of the javascript version of bridgy/granary (social-butterfly) https://www.npmjs.com/package/social-butterfly (Btw, we should use Hackpad! https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad (Mime worked on this, fork of Etherpad, so I'm biased :) )
 * Marty: doing indieweb for the past few years. Slowly accreting new work. Previously did a weekly podcast, summarizing this week in indieweb into a 10 minute podcast. https://martymcgui.re/tag/this-week-indieweb-podcast/
 * Nabil: last indiewebcamp was 2012, been doing it for a while. blogging for 17 years, still got all that content. experimented with lots of software and CMSes. wants to get a sense of where things are now. https://nadreck.me/
 * Don: general developer, backend-ish, very into protocols. site has IndieAuth (showed off this morning). interested in ActivityPub. working on a Fediverse Reader, currently targeting reading Mastodon feeds.https://donpark.org/
 * Katie: Excited about a lot of the new decentralized web technologies and standards. Have been involved but more on the design side, excited to learn more about the nuts and bolts and capabilities are.

Active

 * ActivityPub: Seems to be active and high interest. (v1: still used in the wild somewhere?, v2: the current standard)
 * WebMention: still experimental with larger sites, maybe confined to IndieWeb?
 * MicroFormats: definitely used still, supported by Mastodon for interoperability with IndieWeb.
 * RSS/Atom: standard for feeds
 * LRDD ("host-meta"): standard, not necessarily required by ActivityPub
 * WebFinger: standard, but not required for ActivityPub... kinda. Mastodon uses it so you do need it though.
 * WebSub (née PubSubHubBub): can be replaced by ActivityPub which has its own push mechanism WebSub is a simple protocol that basically says "let me know when bob does something new"
 * XFN: rel="me"

Up and coming

 * JSON Feeds: up and coming? used in some places. not too widely supported yet
 * Microsub: fetching feeds, decoupling feeds and try to normalize them.
 * Micropub: posting side client -> server
 * LitePub: Alternative to ActivityPub used by Pleroma, https://litepub.social/litepub/

Dead

 * Salmon: Dead protocol, not really being supported by anyone these days.
 * FOAF: dead; maybe replaced by "so-and-so follows these people" features, like on mastodon; indieweb has /following pages, for example.

Unclear/Zombie?

 * OStatus: complicated and it's not entirely clear how to implement (Mastodon implemented some of it, which means some pure ActivityPub tools stumble because they're missing ostatus for account discovery)

Related

 * oEmbed/Open Graph: find rich object for embedding in posts.

(A recurring theme is that some protocols aren't "officially" dead, but aren't really being used or maintained.)

Models and Tools

 * Spec collection: https://spec.indieweb.org/
 * Conceptual Model: https://indieweb.org/graphics
 * Tools: https://indieweb.org/tools
 * Building Blocks: https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks

List of libraries

 * https://indieweb.org/projects (specific software projects implement specific protocols, may use external libraries)
 * https://indieweb.org/Micropub#Libraries (Micropub libs)
 * https://indieweb.org/Webmention-developer#Libraries
 * http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2#Parsers (somewhat out of date? https://microformats.io/ has some newer references and live demos of libs)
 * https://indieweb.org/WebSub (links to some test suites and running services?)

Test suites
There's a .rocks suite of protocol domains for exposing what these protocols show.
 * IndieWebify.me: Walks you through to see support of protocols. https://indiewebify.me/
 * ActivityPub: https://test.activitypub.rocks/  ...broken though: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/issues/9   :(
 * WebMention: https://webmention.rocks/
 * MicroPub: https://micropub.rocks/