Helge

I like Math, cows, and wrote bovine.

Public Key

npub1ug7jnfdqyc70nhy79pwnyf5xzw4t7tftp9rpcnyytsv4jgdlgzrsj5vaes

NIP-05 Address

helge_at_mymath.rocks@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswy0ff5kszv08emj0zshfjy6rp824l954sj3sufjz9cx2eyxl5ppccugfhw

Author Public Key

npub1ug7jnfdqyc70nhy79pwnyf5xzw4t7tftp9rpcnyytsv4jgdlgzrsj5vaes

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Last Notes

2024-03-03 08:18:10

Good morning Fediverse. I got a blue sky with small clouds.
Dudes!! and Dudettes!! and other variants!! I got an idea! Let's start a gang. We'll wear cow patterned bandanas and do interoperability drive bys.
Also if people here can give Elixir advice: How does on parametrize tests? I mean this is kind of ugly.

2024-02-29 08:59:34

Good morning Fediverse. It is an all gray day.
Yesterday, I read the phrase "open protocol open social media" somewhere (I think that was it). I was first surprised at the double use of open. Then at "open social media", I'm not a fan, I think. Then at "open protocol". Not sure if I'm a fan. I would prefer talking about "open standards".
I guess just some random musings ...

2024-02-24 07:52:23

Good morning Fediverse. It's a blue sky day.
Somebody with lots of motivation should write a specification for the Mastodon protocol and submit it to the IETF.

2024-02-22 07:30:05

Good morning Fediverse. It's raining.
I have first numbers regarding performance of Fediverse applications. Some observations:
Mastodon creates a really low DB load. I actually expected this, as the DB is probably the worst part to scale for mastodon.social.
Mitra's performance is a lot better than all the other ones I ran
I will probably format the entire thing as messages / cpu second. As this means bigger is better in a bar chart.

2024-02-20 08:05:13

Good morning Fediverse. It's raining.
I started a document containing threat vectors in the Fediverse. Currently, it contains two main ones: Impersonation and Unwanted Content. Are there any others?

2024-02-13 11:50:56

I think I can put one of view points on the difference between ActivityPub and the Fediverse into words:
ActivityPub as a formal specification, should encourage homogeneity. This means it enforces a measure of sameness, that allows applications speaking ActivityPub to talk to each other.
The Fediverse as a social construct, encourages heterogeneity. So the Fediverse is a collection of people with different expectations. It is impossible to meet them all at the same time. This is not even necessary. The Fediverse is federated, so depending on where you are in it, different rules will apply.
I'm well aware that people tend to mean lots of stuff when saying ActivityPub, that's why I try to often use the ActivityPub specification.

2024-02-12 07:30:32

Good morning Fediverse.
It's another day, where I see people writing about HTTP Signatures. So my regular reminders:
HTTP Signatures are a standard in the purview of the IETF.
HTTP Signatures is a terrible name for the transport protocol used by the Fediverse. I should probably go ahead and write up something and call it "Fedi Transport". The mechanism of HTTP Signatures will probably be 1 out of 4 parts.
HTTP Signatures secure the Headers of a HTTP message. This means claiming that implementing HTTP Signatures requires checking the digest is wrong! You should check the digest, because you implement the Digest algorithm. (One can also sign the trailers, and use this to secure chunked HTTP ... )
The algorithms the Fediverse uses are outdated. The new RFCs will probably be out this or next month. We should get ready to switch.

2024-02-08 07:34:53

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Does that mean Mitra accepts a POST signed with a eddsa-jcs-2022 DataIntegrityProof? If yes, I should probably add it verify.
I want to encourage people to switch to Ed25519 keys after all, and get rid of obsoleted / outdated drafts.

2024-02-02 07:05:32

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I think e and pi being properly transcendental implies that one cannot make a right triangle out of them. I'm too out of practice to sketch an argument. Probably, one needs to invoke Euler's equation somewhere. So not being a right triangle has a reason.
For the likely hood to be close to a right triangle, one probably needs to run some estimates. It clearly depends on what exponents you allow. Using 2.5 is already quite the edge case.

2024-01-20 09:26:11

Good morning Fediverse. I've got a blue sky.
Question: Does somebody have an answer to this issue? Basically What license should one place Gherkin files under?
It should certainly be permissible, so everything like GPL, etc is out. I want people to use these features.

2024-01-10 07:18:39

Good morning Fediverse. There's still snow and it's cold.
I've been drawing up my thoughts on how to design a Fediverse application. I'm not sure if I want to talk about this, I just think it's important context for what comes next.
I think I have a pretty firm grasp on what questions somebody designing a Fediverse application or improving ActivityPub should be able to answer: "Can you do recipes?", "Do you support conversations?", and finally "Is it a cron job enough to feed RSS to ActivityPub?" Once you know how to answer these 3 questions, you should ask yourself: "Can I make it more performant?"

2024-01-05 06:39:57

Good morning Fediverse, it's still dark out. Anyway,
2024 will be the year of specifications with test suites in the Fediverse
Also I build something.

2024-01-03 11:57:24

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but more work is required on standards and interoperability.
And making stuff testable. The road towards interoperability should be:
Good Standards -> Test Suite -> Conformant implementations -> Interoperability
I can only say for myself that getting to the point, where we can follow these 4 steps is hard. Even something as simple as FEP-2677: Identifying the Application Actor doesn't have this yet.
However, I think it will be a huge motivation to have pages, where people can earn ✅s, to make their implementations more conformant with whatever is specified.

2023-12-30 17:33:41

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The basic problem for me is: What happens if you run a json-ld processing algorithm?
Example: If you compact the bad example against ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "https://w3id.org/security/data-integrity/v1"] in order to only have a single @context value in the document, the proof would become invalid.
Compacting against a known context is one of the ways, I'm aware of to ensure that the keys of a document mean what you expect.

2023-12-30 07:04:52

Good morning Fediverse. Still small clouds in on a light blue sky for me.
Anyway, I updated my fairer federation FEP Draft with a specification for embeddedObjects. I think for people understanding why I want signed objects, and why embedding them in JsonLD is hard, the correctness and necessity of my solution should be obvious.
My expectation is that this type of constructions will become prevalent if people want to optimize the number of requests necessary with ActivityPub, or say have something such as private groups, circles, etc ... (probably encryption). It will then very quickly be a gateway drug to move away from JsonLD to something like json-schema.

2023-12-28 14:44:22

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I think the key point to realize when working on the Fediverse: It's full of opinions and options. I think for the last half year, at least one person proposed a new solution to how to move accounts between servers. This means that there is a great deal of enthusiasm, which is fun.
The other side of this "full of options" is: It can be hard to figure out the right way to do stuff. So if you try to figure out something simple like posting. You realize that any two applications do it differently. If you ask somebody for their opinion on how to do it, you get a third option. Finally, if you consult the ActivityPub specification, you realize that there are even more allowed options.
I do not know how to resolve this! All I can say if you want to have fun developing for the Fedi, is to prepare for the above scenario and see it with humor.

2023-12-27 19:40:00

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I meant b.
Fun Fedi projects are stuff like pixels.bovine.social and I already know how to build them.

2023-12-27 18:42:01

I'd like an easy and fun to develop for Fedi.

2023-12-27 07:08:21

Good morning Fediverse. It's a lovely morning and time for more Christmas stuff.
You all know about wrapping paper right, and that one can be fancy in wrapping presents? People, I know are more creative than internet search, so no examples. Anyway, imagine getting socks. Then the person gifting you is using their Origami skills to make a cow around the socks in wrapping paper. Result a fancy present that delights.
Now my point: JsonLD is kind of like the fancy wrapping. You add a @context, which is the wrapping. This makes everything fancy. However, this is not what you care about. You want the data that is inside. There are now to ways to go about it: Tearing the wrapping apart, and ruining the cow, but getting the stuff inside quickly. That's JsonLD is just Json. Carefully, inspecting the wrapping, so you can get the socks out without destroying the cow. I'm unsure if I know how to do this. I wish I did know, then JsonLD would make a lot more sense.

2023-12-21 20:05:24

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Thanks for sharing. On a site note: I do not know what json-ld context injection is.
It would be good if one could explain it in terms of the json-ld algorithms or request a new one being added. I suspect that context injection can be realized by compacting against document["@context"] + ["https://newcontext.example"], but I'm not sure this is what is meant.

2023-12-20 15:47:50

That feeling when filing a bug requires you to create the next account with a password...

2023-12-16 18:11:11

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I hope somebody will create the Mastodon patch that allows people to opt out of federating their content. I mean people already have the patch to allow instance local posts, so this shouldn't be a huge challenge.

2023-04-15 18:42:51

I've released bovine 0.1.1, my basic python utility library for the FediVerse. From a technical stand point, it should be good enough now that you only need to use stuff described in the documentation. From an organization stand point, I've created a Codeberg organization so the new repository is: https://codeberg.org/bovine/bovine.
Finally, the thing you might care about the most: Tutorial: A simple FediVerse Server has been expanded and might serve as an introduction to ActivityPub and Webfinger now. HTTP Signatures are hidden in the library, nobody wants to see them anyway.