https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/ec-ngi0-liaison-webinars-and-workshop-april-2021

A simple version with only the slides and speakers is available.

Evan Prodromou

See live updates and demonstrations from the Spritely project and hear how these incubated technologies could help pave positive futures for the fediverse.

Christopher Lemmer Webber
@cwebber@octodon.social
https://spritelyproject.org

In this talk, I am going to try and inspire you to make things that would be literally impossible to make on the centralized web. I am going to talk about both the advantages and disadvantages of doing this kind of thing. Expect to hear concrete examples of software that already exists, and also examples of software that could conceivably exist in the very near future.

Darius Kazemi
@darius@friend.camp

In this talk, organizers of APConf will discuss how we threw together a virtual conference using Peertube and a Big Blue Button server hosted by Fosshost.

Fosshost provides cloud compute power to the free and open source software community. Established hosting providers donate infrastructure to the fosshost project, which in turn they manage and share with the open source community. These reciprocated values of sharing, improve, promote and advance the use of free software. Fosshost provides hosting to more than thirty open source projects including Celestia Space, XFCE, GNOME, XIPH, the ActivityPub Conference and many more.

Morgan Lemmer-Webber / Sebastian Lasse,
@mlemweb@octodon.social / @sl007@mastodon.social
Thomas Markey
https://fosshost.org

Initially, SkoHub was targeted at educators and learners who want to publish and share Open Educational Resources (OER) on the web. Traditional approaches for resource discovery of open content are usually based on archives containing published documents plus metadata. Complementary to this approach, SkoHub takes into account that educational and scholarly resources can be found all over the web and thus a web-centric approach to resource discovery is pursued.

But SkoHub could also play an important role in the fediverse at large for addressing the problem of finding relevant content in a decentralized infrastructure. For example, PeerTube instances could publish their videos to a shared classification and thus be able to present to users resources from all over the fediverse, even without beforehand knowing all the other instances.

Adrian Pohl, literarymachine
https://skohub.io
@acka47@openbiblio.social

• How do we discover nodes?
• How do we deal with network partitions?
• How do we define bad behavior and how do we prevent it?
The algorithms which solve these problems are present in almost every decentralized protocol. They are also famous for being very difficult to get right!

In this lecture I will to propose an alternative. Why can’t we let the database do the replication and stick to writing the rules? When a node is a finite state automaton, all we need is an SQL-like language to define the set of all legal state transitions.

Caleb James DeLisle
@cjd@mastodon.social

Go-Fed takes to heart the philosophy that the ActivityPub specification left opportunities for further evolution of its core ideas. It also embraces the philosophy of "only solving one problem" to provide a concrete platform for experimenting with the protocol itself or experimenting with a complementary idea.

This talk addresses Go-Fed’s unique history of being an early adopter, the challenges of developing in a statically-typed language, and the difficulty of rigorously isolating the "ActivityPub protocol layer" from other layers or an application. It goes over the approach to adopting the suite of libraries in new or existing codebases for interested developers. Finally, the project maintainer will provide his outlook on where Go-Fed can help provide a productive platform for protocol experiments, and where the project will focus efforts into 2021.

CJ
@cj@mastodon.technology

This session will cover what’s new in OAuth 2.1 and how ActivityPub can take advantage of some of the newest features of OAuth to better support a wide range of interoperable ActivityPub clients.

Aaron Parecki
@aaronpk@aaronparecki.com

Simon Urli
@Neo_nderthalis@mastodon.social

Nilesh Trivedi
@nilesh@fosstodon.org
https://LearnAwesome.org

• Does changing from gated platforms to fediverse support a pluralistic culture?
• What is the likelihood that larger instances will represent a coherent implementation in terms of standards such as ActivityPub?
• How does blocking (particularly blocks between instances) impact this adjustment in public sphere?
• Why do we need a specific measure of blocking and which limits do they confine?

Erwin Ernst Steinhammer
@eest9@chaos.social

Unfortunately, as it is known, the most used social networks have serious privacy problems, which leads to the voluntary delivery of data to large corporations. It is for this reason that a small project has been started where the use of Mastodon is proposed for the development of online discussions on specific topics with psychology students, which could result in experiences that generate data on what elements to consider for unleash the discussion and how the participants relate in this type of scenario.
Fortunately, Mastodon and its mobile applications favor the development of activities without problems for users, which could be successfully developed by a small community of psychologists.

Prof. Dr. José Manuel Meza Cano

[ES] Spanish version of the Talk available: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e2923ad5-afc5-49e7-afa3-613eef44adb6

Hamish Campbell
@hamishcampbell@mastodon.social

https://unite.openworlds.info/explore/organizations
Background http://hamishcampbell.com/index.php/tag/indymedia/

In this talk, I’ll lay out the way my server uses NoSQL to provide high-performance, highly-scalabale storage for ActivityPub objects.

My ActivityConf 2020 presentation about building an ActivityPub C2S/S2S server and client using NoSQL CouchDB as the server.

Brad Koehn
@bkoehn@mastodon.social

ActivityPub gave us interoperability at the data level, and we’d like to do the same on the software level with CommonsPub. Instead of a top-down “product design” approach to building an app or platform, we’d like a world where even non-technical users and communities can do it themselves: being able to piece together custom experiences from an ecosystem of apps and plugins developed by different groups who all contribute to (and benefit from) a pool of interdependent software libraries, while each focusing on different use cases, features and user experiences.

We have implemented groups (to further decentralise the fediverse by rendering users and communities independent from the instance they’re on), and decoupled the federation and storage of ActivityStreams activities/objects from the app’s relational database, backend logic, APIs and frontend interfaces. This means users can have one fediverse identity and a timeline which shows all types of content and activities in one place, while participating in multiple communities and using specialised apps for different activities.

Mayel de Borniol, with the participation of the CommonsPub Team & Contributors.
@mayel@pub.mayel.space

We’ll review how some of the challenges faced by centralized platforms, which struggle with their own size and scale, have been addressed in networks of smaller, community run, more moderated servers. In the debate over how to make a healthier internet, the open platforms and open protocols in the model of the Fediverse may have some of the best resources to isolate bad actors, including Gab.

Derek Caelin is an Innovation and Data Specialist at Counterpart International (CPI) with experience in open source technology and social media. He has helped activists deploy technology for social good at CPI, PeaceTech Lab, and the United States Institute of Peace. In writing this article, Derek spoke with 80 people, primarily on Mastodon, including 12 interviews of Fediverse administrators and moderators as well as hate speech monitors and experts in dangerous speech. He also conducted a survey of Fediverse users with 670 respondents.

Derek Caelin
@Argus@mastodon.technology