16:02:35 <RRSAgent> RRSAgent has joined #social
16:02:35 <RRSAgent> logging to https://www.w3.org/2018/02/28-social-irc
16:02:44 <sandro> meeting: Social Web CG
16:02:56 <sandro> present+
16:02:58 <cwebber2> present+
16:03:01 <ajordan> yeah Plumble read "welcome back ajordan" out loud to me
16:03:03 <hellekin> present+
16:03:10 <rhiaro> present+
16:03:11 <rhiaro> but in irc
16:03:20 <ajordan> present+
16:03:27 <evanpro> present+
16:03:28 <ajordan> same, probably
16:03:31 <melody> i'm joining mumble but i'm going to be a minute, apparently it's not configured
16:03:46 <evanpro> I'm here
16:03:52 <evanpro> I keep getting bounced off the server
16:03:58 <evanpro> Yes
16:04:18 <evanpro> I'm waiting for the VoIP system with AI built in
16:04:21 <saranix> present+
16:04:22 <saranix> irc only
16:04:42 <evanpro> So that we can automate the first 5 minutes of calls that's about who can hear who and what is working and not working
16:05:25 <cwebber2> evanpro: haha
16:05:33 <Loqi> rofl
16:05:34 <ajordan_> ajordan_ has joined #social
16:05:57 <evanpro> I'm going to be talking so I don't want to scribe
16:05:59 <cwebber2> scribenick: ajordan
16:06:06 <cwebber2> chair: cwebber2
16:06:08 <ajordan_> scribenick: ajordan_
16:06:35 <hellekin> yes
16:06:40 <hellekin> <- how
16:06:43 <evanpro> evanpro has changed the topic to: https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2018-02-28 Chat Logs: https://chat.indieweb.org/social/today
16:06:45 <ajordan_> cwebber2: okay, we have several new members
16:06:51 <ajordan_> cwebber2: maybe we should do introductions again?
16:07:07 <ajordan_> ... hello I'm chris webber, I'm the cochair of the SocialCG along with aaronpk who couldn't make it
16:07:13 <ajordan_> ... and I'm coeditor of the ActivityPub standard
16:07:17 <cwebber2> scribenick: cwebber2
16:07:23 <ajordan_> muted
16:07:43 <drEquivalent> Imma just sit here and lurk in shadows, I think, for now.
16:07:50 <ajordan_> ah screw it
16:08:19 <cwebber2> evanpro: ajordan_ is maintainer of the pump.io social networking software, is invited expert for the SocialWG, has worked a lot on AS2 and AP
16:08:27 <ajordan_> thx evanpro, that was a great intro
16:08:34 <cwebber2> scribenick: ajordan_
16:08:49 <ajordan_> evanpro: so I'm Evan Prodromou, formal cochair of the Social WG
16:08:59 <ajordan_> ... developer of StatusNet, pump.io and other social networking projects
16:09:01 <cwebber2> note irc folks, also feel free to introduce yourselves
16:09:10 <ajordan_> ... I edited AS2
16:09:18 <ajordan_> hellekin: hello I'm hellekin
16:09:44 <sandro> hellekin, you're very quite, I can kind of hear
16:10:28 <hellekin> OK, let me write. I can keep quiet on the audio :)
16:10:31 <cwebber2> rhiaro, saranix, drEquivalent: if you'd like to self-introduce on irc :)
16:10:42 <ajordan_> sandro: hi everyone I was staff contact for the socialwg
16:10:44 <ajordan_> ... one of them
16:10:51 <ajordan_> ... I don't tend to deploy software but I love to play around with that
16:10:54 <ajordan_> s/that/it/
16:11:00 <ajordan_> ... *chuckles* I'll stop at that
16:11:13 <ajordan_> cwebber2: if our IRC friends  give a description I'll read it off
16:11:16 <ajordan_> ... let's move forward
16:11:20 <ajordan_> ... two items on the agenda
16:11:22 <saranix> I'm an independant researcher for the last 5 years in decentralized social networks, and a small business consultant for open technologies
16:11:40 <ajordan_> ... one is some linked data stuff I'm working on, quick announcement, and the other is evanpro's dating on the open web
16:11:52 <cwebber2> thank you saranix! I relayed via voice
16:12:22 <cwebber2> s/linked data stuff/linked data object capabilities/
16:12:32 <ajordan_> cwebber2: okay so about the first topic
16:12:38 <cwebber2> https://w3c-ccg.github.io/ld-ocap/
16:12:41 <ajordan_> ... not sure if anyone here's payed attention at all but lemme link it
16:12:52 <ajordan_> ... so I'm a member of the w3c community credentials group
16:13:00 <hellekin> So I said I'm a former Lorea developer, maintainer for GNU consensus that aims to coordinate the federated web and the P2P systems, now working on an EU consortium called PUBLIC that I presented at FOSDEM, which aims to promote free software as a public digital infrastructure in Europe, and respond to H2020-ICT-28 call on "Future Hyper-connected Sociality".
16:13:06 <ajordan_> ... I'm collaborating with Mark Miller who's known for being sort of *the* capabilities person
16:13:27 <ajordan_> ... for anyone who's not familiar with capabilities it's a different model than ACLs, users and groups and so on
16:13:37 <ajordan_> ... a common metaphor is a car key
16:13:48 <ajordan_> ... in the future your car might scan you and say "welcome evanpro"
16:14:03 <ajordan_> ... one thing you can do is delegate keys
16:14:20 <ajordan_> ... and you can add caveats, so you can e.g. make a valet key that says "you can drive it, but only for 5 miles"
16:14:33 <ajordan_> ... and you can also add caveats for revocation, so you can delete keys
16:14:54 <ajordan_> ... some interesting reasons to maybe want these things. I'm bringing it up because our notion of who has authority over stuff in AP is very loose
16:15:07 <ajordan_> ... e.g. if you send a message we kinda have implied access control, you probably look at the headers to guess
16:15:19 <ajordan_> ... for email this isn't an issue because a message is just *sent*
16:15:24 <drEquivalent> I'm just a (pretty mediocre) sysadmin, believer in everything decentralized and free and open, that thinks that he knows what he's doing, and sometimes thinks he has good ideas. That's the best way I can describe myself right now.
16:15:27 <ajordan_> ... in AP you might retrieve that message later
16:15:40 <ajordan_> ... in general not a problem but if you address a forwarding group it can get messy
16:15:46 <rhiaro> oh hi sorry. I was also a staff contact for SWWG, it took over my phd thesis, and I co-edited some specs and stuff
16:15:50 <ajordan_> ... but right now those usecases aren't too important yet
16:16:04 <ajordan_> ... we have different usecases in the CG
16:16:16 <ajordan_> cwebber2: one example would be groups, or collections
16:16:20 <ajordan_> ... that have moderators
16:16:40 <ajordan_> ... maybe you have a Flickr-pool style collection, where you want a bunch of people to be able to administer it
16:16:43 <evanpro> q+
16:16:58 <ajordan_> ... there's no way to delegate access, or let people moderate
16:16:58 <drEquivalent> Just want to see what SocialCG meetings are all about.
16:17:22 <ajordan_> ... I'm not trying to push this as a "we gotta do it now", just as a "if you run into these things, maybe it's a good idea to look at this spec"
16:17:27 <ajordan_> evanpro: I have a question, I'm queued
16:17:27 <cwebber2> ack evanpro
16:17:28 <cwebber2> q?
16:17:33 <sandro> drEquivalent, they vary quite a lot   :-)    Welcome.
16:17:35 <cwebber2> ack cwebber
16:17:37 <ajordan_> ... so the way I'd do soemthing like this is with oauth tokens
16:17:57 <ajordan_> ... define a bunch of scopes, you have to have this scope on this token, etc. and give out tokens to people based on auth from the user
16:18:04 <ajordan_> ... how are LD capabilities different from this?
16:18:07 <ajordan_> cwebber2: great question
16:18:18 <ajordan_> ... so you can use OAuth tokens in a very ACL way or a very capabilities way
16:18:31 <ajordan_> ... if you hand out oauth2 style bearer tokens, that's very similar to a capability
16:18:36 <ajordan_> ... but you can't do some things
16:18:42 <ajordan_> ... you can't do ??? and you can't attenuate it
16:18:56 <ajordan_> ... there's an interesting project called macaroons from Google which is a big inspiration for LD capabilities
16:18:58 <evanpro> https://research.google.com/pubs/pub41892.html
16:18:59 <evanpro> haw
16:19:07 <ajordan_> ... how they work is they're kinda like bearer tokens that you hand out
16:19:17 <ajordan_> ... but they can do revocation and such
16:19:37 <ajordan_> ... one nice thing with LD capabilities is that the mechanism we have ties in nicely with LD signatures, so you don't have to provide a separate HTTP header component
16:19:45 <ajordan_> ... it can kinda flow around the linked data system that we have
16:20:04 <ajordan_> ... another interesting side effect is that with bearer tokens if you intercept them you have access to them, same with macaroons
16:20:15 <ajordan_> ... not the same thing with LD capabilities, you can have it in public
16:20:45 <ajordan_> ... for example someone in the community credentials group is using this for blockchain, so you can see everything public but you can't do anything unless you have the private key
16:20:50 <cwebber2> q?
16:20:58 <ajordan_> ... those are the differences, not saying oauth2 bearer tokens aren't the way to go, just giving a contrast
16:21:28 <ajordan_> cwebber2: *reads off drEquivalent's IRC description*
16:21:48 <melody> present+
16:21:54 <ajordan_> cwebber2: *reads off hellekin's description*
16:22:08 <hellekin> thank you
16:22:12 <cwebber2> q?
16:22:14 <evanpro> scribe inception
16:22:27 <ajordan_> ... nobody on the speaker queue
16:22:43 <ajordan_> cwebber2: just wanted to put that out there as something for people to think about
16:22:46 <ajordan_> ... let's move on
16:22:56 <ajordan_> cwebber2: evanpro I think this is you?
16:22:57 <saranix> http://theory.stanford.edu/~ataly/Papers/macaroons.pdf <- non-google link for macaroons
16:23:02 <ajordan_> ... lemme take myself off push to talk
16:23:13 <ajordan_> evanpro: okay
16:23:25 <ajordan_> ... so I've set it up so I'm now constantly making noise, sorry about that
16:23:28 <evanpro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/
16:23:44 <ajordan_> ... I've got a presentation about it, I made it at Mozilla's MozFest in October of last year
16:23:49 <ajordan_> ... about using AP for dating on the open web
16:24:06 <ajordan_> ... I think it's actually a really interesting opportunity for open web tech to start making a real difference in real people's lives
16:24:16 <ajordan_> ... and presenting a real contrast to silo'd software
16:24:36 <ajordan_> ... it's a usecase we don't talk about a lot but is actually pretty important to people's lives
16:24:44 <ajordan_> ... I've dropped the link so people can follow along
16:25:09 <ajordan_> ... just to be clear there's a page that's specfically for this in-person discussion, I kept it in just for other discussions
16:25:29 <ajordan_> ... sex and dating is a big world, it's important to keep in mind that people come from all walks of life, let's not be judgemental
16:25:34 <ajordan_> sandro: can you say slide numbers?
16:26:05 <sandro> I'll do that
16:26:10 <ajordan_> evanpro: when we talk about online dating it's about finding people and making connections
16:26:11 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/2
16:26:18 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/4
16:26:22 <ajordan_> ... typically people you don't already know, it's how you *make* connections
16:26:30 <ajordan_> ... on slide 4, necessary set of logos
16:26:37 <ajordan_> ... it's a very important set of functionality
16:27:06 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/5
16:27:09 <ajordan_> ... lots of variation, e.g. quick relations on tinder, longer relationships, different interests, people of color, lgbtqa folks, etc.
16:27:18 <ajordan_> ... most of them have very similar functionality
16:27:29 <ajordan_> ... first you define a profile, often pseudononymous
16:27:39 <ajordan_> ... trying to give enough of a description of yourself
16:27:52 <ajordan_> ... but not enough that your pseudonymity could be broken
16:27:53 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/6
16:28:07 <ajordan_> evanpro: the next important part is defining your own search criteria, who are you looking for
16:28:19 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/7
16:28:22 <ajordan_> ... blockers e.g. you don't want to date smokers
16:28:28 <ajordan_> ... gender preferences, etc.
16:28:36 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/8
16:28:44 <ajordan_> ... next functionality is searches, you want to make descisions about who you contact
16:28:54 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/9
16:29:06 <ajordan_> ... next slide, there's usually a way to express attraction, "I'm interested in dating you, I'd like to discuss further"
16:29:16 <ajordan_> ... next slide, there's usually in-band messaging
16:29:21 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/10
16:29:31 <ajordan_> ... people can preserve pseudononymous identities but still learn more
16:29:42 <ajordan_> ... next typically these conversations move out of band
16:29:54 <ajordan_> ... e.g. sharing phone number, location, etc.
16:29:55 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/11
16:30:02 <ajordan_> ... they kind of step out of the system into the real world
16:30:16 <ajordan_> ... or there's a second branch, one or the other or both decides not to connect
16:30:26 <ajordan_> ... they can cut off the connection and cancel any further conversation
16:30:36 <ajordan_> ... and that's really the tech that dating sites have, there are lots of variations
16:30:40 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/12
16:30:54 <ajordan_> ... the way that people typically make money is hosting the profiles, charging someone to put up the profile
16:31:05 <ajordan_> ... they'll charge for search, extended search, specific kinds of searches
16:31:12 <ajordan_> ... they'll charge at match time
16:31:21 <ajordan_> ... and also messaging is a place that people tend to put monetization at
16:31:34 <ajordan_> ... so e.g. you can only send 3 messages, messages to 5 people a month, or something like that
16:31:36 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/13
16:31:50 <ajordan_> ... dating is very popular, 13 percent of american adults are on online dating sites
16:31:58 <ajordan_> ... 50 percent unmarried
16:32:02 <ajordan_> ... very big part of the population
16:32:05 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/14
16:32:15 <ajordan_> ... it's a big part of people's lives
16:32:44 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/15
16:32:49 <ajordan_> evanpro: can we skip the scribing for something I have a huge slide deck for
16:32:58 <ajordan_> <ajordan> sounds great
16:33:06 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/16
16:33:57 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/18
16:34:38 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/19
16:34:53 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/20
16:35:09 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/21
16:35:16 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/22
16:36:05 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/23
16:36:11 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/24
16:37:09 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/26
16:37:32 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/27
16:38:01 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/28
16:38:34 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/29
16:38:58 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/30
16:40:18 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/31
16:40:20 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/32
16:41:27 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/33
16:42:37 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/34
16:43:20 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/35
16:43:36 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/36
16:43:38 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/37
16:44:00 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/39
16:44:38 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/40
16:44:53 <cwebber2> relationship to job search is interesting
16:45:15 <sandro> http://slides.com/evanpro/dating-on-the-open-web-7#/0/41
16:45:30 <cwebber2> I do think that many people on dating sites do want to be pseudononymous until they get connected also
16:45:38 <cwebber2> but I've never used one so I don't actually know for sure!
16:46:34 <cwebber2> evanpro: I think there's a language of privilege that comes with open technologies of "you just put your name out there and put it out there" and that ignores some of the privacy and security needs of people different walks of life... we want to be respectful of that
16:46:46 <sandro> q+
16:46:51 <cwebber2> evanpro: I'm taking myself off constant discussion but I wanted to get through this
16:47:13 <cwebber2> ack sandro
16:47:15 <saranix> unfortunately, with the proliferation of facial recognition, it is impossible to be pseudonymous. People just do a search and find your real social media page these days...
16:47:20 <ajordan_> sandro: so I probably have 100 comments/suggestions
16:47:41 <ajordan_> ... I'll start with a question: why does IAC not do any kind of cross-site connectivity? seems like it would be a win for their business
16:47:46 <cwebber2> saranix, that's a real challenge yeah :|
16:47:47 <ajordan_> evanpro: that is a super good question
16:47:47 <melody> q+
16:47:49 <ajordan_> ... I don't know
16:48:11 <ajordan_> ... if I was to speculate my guess would be that it's because they have different market segments that they address with those different brands
16:48:13 <cwebber2> q+ to talk about search
16:48:16 <ajordan_> ... e.g. young urban people with tinder
16:48:26 <ajordan_> ... alternative people with okcupid, older people with Match
16:48:35 <ajordan_> ... but I do not work there so I don't really know why
16:48:38 <cwebber2> q+ to talk about pseudononymous -> more information "flow"
16:48:39 <cwebber2> q?
16:48:42 <cwebber2> ack melody
16:48:52 <ajordan_> cwebber2: go ahead melody
16:49:07 <sandro> q+ to ask about how to get critical mass
16:49:13 <ajordan_> melody: I also have about a million comments/suggestions trying to boil it down here
16:49:36 <hellekin> Won't q because I didn't fixed sound, but a suggestion to look at Attribute-Based Credentials to use zero-knowledge connection to find matches.
16:49:46 <ajordan_> ... I see there could be some real concerns with visibility in terms of how much reach you want your profile to have in a situation like this
16:50:20 <ajordan_> ... if people are closeted, or have other privacy concerns, it seems like there's a real risk of allowing kind of infinite spread and searchability of these profiles compared with a traditional social media profile
16:50:29 <ajordan_> evanpro: uhhhh yeah I think that's a *really* important question
16:50:34 <ajordan_> ... there are some interesting parts of that
16:51:06 <ajordan_> ... I think that for someone say in NYC even having the plainest "I'm a 34 year old man looking to meet other men" would not feel like a big exposure and putting yourself at risk
16:51:16 <sandro> q?
16:51:16 <ajordan_> ... but if you're in a small town, there are only so many 34-year-old men
16:51:29 <ajordan_> ... so what we would think of as completely anonymous information could be hard for someone to reveal
16:51:41 <ajordan_> ... that said there's a point at which the data is not sufficient to make a match
16:52:03 <ajordan_> ... if it just comes down as I'm a man looking for other men, I don't know if that's enough for someone else to decide they want to pursue
16:52:06 <cwebber2> hellekin: do you have more specific comments on how that would work?
16:52:13 <ajordan_> ... I think also you'd kinda mentioned having stuff all over the web
16:52:21 <cwebber2> ZKP are great, but how would you do that in practice?
16:52:24 <ajordan_> ... search engine visibility is pretty important too
16:52:35 <ajordan_> ... I think robots.txt might handle a lot but there are some tricky parts in there
16:52:57 <saranix> also, let's not forget that profile criterea may not be the best way to find a romantic match. How often are we surprised to find we fall in love with someone who has attributes we would've thought were deal-breakers?
16:53:00 <ajordan_> ... I'm not sure what a minimal amount of data that's enough to make a dating decision (I'd like to pursue this, find out more about this person) is without exposing you
16:53:04 <cwebber2> q?
16:53:06 <ajordan_> ... I think that might be up to each person sometimes
16:53:06 <cwebber2> ack cwebber
16:53:06 <Zakim> cwebber, you wanted to talk about search and to talk about pseudononymous -> more information "flow"
16:53:40 <melody> q+
16:53:52 <ajordan_> cwebber2: *reads hellekin's comment* I don't know much about it myself but I'd be interested in learning more
16:54:12 <ajordan_> cwebber2: sometimes we talk about the upsides and downsides of the fact that in a decentralized system people can set up as many profiles as they want
16:54:17 <ajordan_> ... it can be bad, people can use that to abuse
16:54:23 <ajordan_> ... but in this case I wonder if it may be very useful
16:54:44 <ajordan_> ... it might actually be that you make multiple profiles and the profile you give initially... say you have some kind of oracle that connects you
16:54:55 <bengo> bengo has joined #social
16:55:06 <ajordan_> ... you give some of your information but not all of it, but once you match, you reveal your primary profile
16:55:23 <cwebber2> q?
16:55:32 <cwebber2> ack sandro
16:55:32 <Zakim> sandro, you wanted to ask about how to get critical mass
16:55:42 <ajordan_> sandro: so I have a lot to say on the thread melody started, and the one cwebber2 started
16:56:02 <evanpro> q+
16:56:03 <ajordan_> ... I'll start with the one melody brought up
16:56:51 <ajordan_> ... Evan I don't think the minimal info approach is really gonna work... I mean, profiles that don't have somebody's face clearly shown... on some really sex-only you can get away with just a body shot but with relationships you have to show your face and now with face-recognition tech your face is just as good as your name
16:56:58 <ajordan_> ... I don't think you can go with just technical security
16:57:19 <ajordan_> ... what's stopping somebody from building a bot that gets on each of these systems and crawls it and extracts data for use in e.g. blackmail
16:57:32 <ajordan_> ... I think what's stopping them is active countermeasures by the service, and also legal countermeasures
16:57:35 <ajordan_> ... terms of service
16:57:45 <ajordan_> ... and between those they probably handle most of the threats
16:58:05 <ajordan_> ... I don't think we can do much about active countermeasures, it's really hard to tell if someone's hitting thousands of decentralized servers
16:58:13 <ajordan_> ... maybe we could use the really big nodes
16:58:21 <ajordan_> ... I think the more interesting one is the ToS
16:58:31 <ajordan_> ... "if you're accessing this site you can only use it for dating"
16:58:42 <ajordan_> ... I don't know how to make that stand up in court but I think it's doable
16:58:54 <ajordan_> ... and if it's made clear in the vocabulary, etc. then we can get the moral high ground
16:59:03 <ajordan_> ... anyone who writes a crawler is clearly being a bad person
16:59:10 <ajordan_> sandro: should I do cwebber2's topic?
16:59:11 <cwebber2> just wanted to note that expressing Terms of Service is being explored in the Verifiable Credentials folks
16:59:13 <cwebber2> q?
16:59:16 <ajordan_> cwebber2: uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh suuuuuure
16:59:22 <evanpro> I think it's noon? Are we done?
16:59:37 <ajordan_> sandro: this kind of comes back to the first and last of Evan's questions... if you block somebody you need to stop them from just making another account
16:59:40 <evanpro> OK
16:59:52 <ajordan_> ... I think the way to do that is we have our existing social graph
17:00:07 <ajordan_> ... if I want to make a dating profile I set up a new profile somewhere and I have me or one of my friends endorse them
17:00:25 <ajordan_> ... I as a real person who many of you know know who this pseudononymous person is
17:00:34 <ajordan_> ... they'll deanonymize in court but otherwise they're okay
17:00:42 <ajordan_> ... I think that solves the problem Chris raised and allows blocking to work
17:00:47 <cwebber2> poll to ask if we're willing to extend... 15 mins?  30 mins?  can't extend?
17:01:01 <sandro> I could talk about this for hours   :-)
17:01:02 <cwebber2> ok with extending 15-30
17:01:12 <ajordan_> <ajordan> I could extend 30 but would prefer 15
17:01:20 <hellekin> I will skip the last part, but I'm open to discuss more asynchronously.
17:01:20 <cwebber2> q?
17:01:27 <ajordan_> evanpro: idk if we need to go a full 30 minutes
17:01:42 <ajordan_> ... if this is something the group's interested in, what's next steps?
17:01:48 <tantek> tantek has joined #social
17:01:54 <ajordan_> cwebber2: why don't we ack melody first
17:01:59 <cwebber2> ack melody
17:02:26 <ajordan_> melody: I wanted to speak a little bit about the way centralized services handle the thing I brought up earlier
17:02:31 <ajordan_> ... siloing acts as a shiled a lot
17:03:00 <ajordan_> ... one of the reasons someone getting on an lgbtq specific service or whatever is that there's a certain level of assurance anyone else who's on there is on there for the same reason
17:03:13 <ajordan_> ... and if your profile's visible to them you're sort of sharing the same level of risk
17:03:22 <ajordan_> ... there's almost a sort of like... mutual risk there
17:03:38 <ajordan_> ... it's a similar thing... okcupid has a "I don't want to see or be seen by straight people"
17:04:00 <ajordan_> ... so if you're in the closet only people who take on the risk of setting their profile of being a not-hetero person can see you
17:04:08 <sandro> +1 melody Mutual Risk, Mutual Revelation --- replicating this will be important
17:04:17 <ajordan_> ... I think replicating some aspect of that is probably going to be important even in a decentralized setting
17:04:18 <cwebber2> ack evanpro
17:04:43 <ajordan_> evanpro: I think there are definitely some interesting aspects to that
17:05:32 <sandro> evanpro: Sometimes people circulate screencaps, ...
17:05:42 <ajordan_> ... I know people who screencap dating profiles and send them around... being on silos isn't a great protection
17:06:02 <ajordan_> evanpro: the thing I got on the queue to talk about was reputations
17:06:22 <saranix> they don't have to be silos though. it can be a web of seekers and matchmaking nodes. People submit to multiple matchmakers which handle the profile screening and selective reveal
17:06:28 <ajordan_> ... if I get a message from someone or a match offer, that I would have some automated way of finding out if the person is abusive or a spammer
17:06:34 <ajordan_> ... and has been reported as that in the past
17:06:42 <ajordan_> ... or "this person has been reported as wonderful to date"
17:07:04 <ajordan_> ... it's a whole other level of functionality there but it's actually not a big part of a lot of dating systems I've seen
17:07:09 <cwebber2> q+ to mention verifiable credentials may be a good data model
17:07:12 <evanpro> so: reputation systems
17:07:13 <ajordan_> ... it would be a benefit, it's kind of a cool part of that
17:07:25 <sandro> q+ to wonder how one could get critical mass
17:07:31 <cwebber2> ack cwebber2
17:07:40 <sandro> q-
17:07:40 <ajordan_> cwebber2: so the thing I wanted to say was
17:08:05 <ajordan_> ... directly to respond to Evan's suggestion for making claims about another user, if you're going to look at that in a system the verifiable credentials data model might be a good thing to look at
17:08:16 <ajordan_> ... that's being built for saying "this entity says _this_ about some other entity"
17:08:27 <ajordan_> ... it might be a good way to express it, plus it's JSON-LD
17:08:35 <ajordan_> ... there may be downsides too, reputation systems have upsides and downsides
17:08:46 <ajordan_> ... it can be great until people use reputation systems to say bad stuff about good people
17:08:53 <ajordan_> ... I don't know if there's any way around that
17:09:09 <ajordan_> ... I wanted to see if evanpro could bring us forward on the "where to from here" topic from earlier
17:09:15 <cwebber2> fwiw, here's the Verifiable Credentials Data Model https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/
17:09:25 <ajordan_> evanpro: yeah so I think that what I would really like to see is what would next steps be
17:09:38 <ajordan_> ... for me as a technologist I would kind of do next steps of create a profile hosting service
17:09:48 <ajordan_> ... either with pump.io or with another system I find, Mastadon maybe
17:09:55 <ajordan_> ... and then a search service to implement search
17:09:59 <ajordan_> ... just a proof of concept
17:10:05 <sandro> q+ to wonder how one could get critical mass
17:10:14 <ajordan_> ... the q there is whether it would be visible and useful
17:10:19 <ajordan_> ... and what the role would be here at the CG
17:10:30 <ajordan_> ... my feeling would be to start implementing first and get finer-grained definitions later
17:10:31 <cwebber2> ack cwebber
17:10:31 <Zakim> cwebber, you wanted to mention verifiable credentials may be a good data model
17:10:46 <ajordan_> ... and if it's applicable enough to report back to the CG, do that as things develop
17:10:56 <ajordan_> cwebber2: uhh yeah +1 to the general direction you laid out evanpro
17:11:07 <cwebber2> ack sandro
17:11:07 <Zakim> sandro, you wanted to wonder how one could get critical mass
17:11:10 <ajordan_> ... as cochair of the CG I can say I would appreciate holding those conversations and hearing updates here
17:11:22 <ajordan_> sandro: so I'm all in favor of code first cuz I love coding and it's fun and you learn a lot
17:11:32 <ajordan_> ... at the same time there's all these other social issues we've been talking about
17:11:42 <drEquivalent> drEquivalent has joined #social
17:11:45 <ajordan_> ... I think you could build a completely functional system but people might not use it
17:11:58 <ajordan_> ... dating systems have an even worse critical mass than social media
17:12:09 <ajordan_> ... you can get friends to switch but not with dating sites
17:12:18 <ajordan_> ... I'm just wondering, why would people use this system
17:12:35 <ajordan_> evanpro: I think being able to make that case is really important
17:13:01 <ajordan_> ... part of the success of Mastadon is that it's provided a real alternative to people concerned about harassment on e.g. Twitter
17:13:02 <saranix> critical mass in a decentralized world looks like "city xxx queer bbs", "west coast masochists", etc.
17:13:09 <ajordan_> ... it's less about tech exploration and more about social experimentation
17:13:37 <ajordan_> ... I think that more worrying than having nobody on it would be to get people on it who feel they're having their security or privacy violated
17:13:50 <ajordan_> ... "I didn't realize my real name or telephone would be on this account when I set it up"
17:13:54 <Loqi> cwebber2: lol
17:13:58 <cwebber2> q?
17:14:11 <melody> q+
17:14:18 <sandro> q+
17:14:26 <cwebber2> ack melody
17:15:04 <ajordan_> melody: I think your instinct that it's worse to have something where people whose security and privacy is being violated rather than something no one will use...
17:15:09 <saranix> to put it more generically, really, you have 2 forces of attraction: geography, and mutual attribute match -- the pools are finite.
17:15:15 <sandro> Caught between a Ghost Town and a Mine Field
17:15:20 <ajordan_> ... I think the minimum viable feature set for a system like this is probably gonna be more extensive than you might anticipate
17:15:31 <evanpro> sandro: That's a good headline
17:15:46 <ajordan_> ... there's going to need to be some really robust ways of dealing with incoming messages from people who just absolutely do not fit your criteria who will message you anyway
17:15:56 <ajordan_> ... and I don't think that reactive blocking is going to be enough to handle this
17:16:12 <ajordan_> ... that's the kind of thing that immediately puts women off of a lot of online dating systems and has them opting out
17:16:14 <cwebber2> ack sandro
17:16:18 <ajordan_> cwebber2: thanks melody, go for it sandro
17:16:28 <ajordan_> sandro: I'm just starting to have an image in my head for how to approach this
17:16:32 <ajordan_> ... trying to learn from this
17:16:42 <ajordan_> ... just imagine this as a network of Mastadon servers
17:16:58 <ajordan_> ... the server admin would take responsibility for the environment on that node and the behavior of the users on that node
17:17:12 <ajordan_> ... obviously there's a complicated politics among the admins then, as to who they decide to federate with
17:17:17 <ajordan_> ... but I think that *might* work
17:17:37 <ajordan_> ... I'm just thinking about some of my social groups and whether there might be someone who might take that central hub role
17:17:46 <saranix> cwebber2: thx
17:17:47 <ajordan_> ... you'd have to separate the technical from the management
17:18:03 <ajordan_> ... they put people on it and then make sure people behave reasonably and then they federate
17:18:53 <evanpro> I need to drop out
17:18:59 <evanpro> I'd love to keep talking further
17:19:04 <ajordan_> cwebber2: well so we've gone over the 15 minutes we agreed to, sounds like we can keep talking about this for ages
17:19:08 <ajordan_> ... so we'll cut it off
17:19:28 <ajordan_> ... if people have further things to talk about on this issue... one thing that was mentioned very briefly by evanpro was search engines
17:19:35 <ajordan_> ... maybe that's a good topic for future meetings
17:19:36 <evanpro> Thanks Chris!
17:19:42 <ajordan_> ... thanks everyone for showing up and have a good one!
17:19:42 <hellekin> ditto
17:19:53 <sandro> cwebber2, I noticed that Mastodon is getting a version of search around now
17:19:56 <ajordan_> <ajordan> thanks cwebber2! and see ya evanpro
17:20:05 <ajordan_> <ajordan> evanpro: btw, I got pump.io stickers :-)
17:20:06 <sandro> might be good to have a discussion on how they're doing it
17:20:19 <hellekin> evanpro: ABC is currently researched by Dyne in the DECODE EU project.
17:20:23 <sandro> RRSAgent, make logs public
17:20:37 <sandro> RRSAgent, bye
17:20:37 <RRSAgent> I see no action items
17:31:59 <RRSAgent> RRSAgent has joined #social
17:31:59 <RRSAgent> logging to https://www.w3.org/2018/02/28-social-irc
17:32:04 <sandro> RRSAgent, pointer?
17:32:04 <RRSAgent> See https://www.w3.org/2018/02/28-social-irc#T17-32-04
17:32:07 <tantek> enjoy cwebber2!
17:32:18 <sandro> okay cwebber2 ?
17:32:24 <sandro> RRSAgent, bye
17:32:32 <sandro> RRSAgent, make logs public
17:32:34 <sandro> RRSAgent, bye
17:32:34 <RRSAgent> I see no action items
17:35:33 <RRSAgent> RRSAgent has joined #social
17:35:33 <RRSAgent> logging to https://www.w3.org/2018/02/28-social-irc
17:35:39 <sandro> RRSAgent, make minutes
17:35:39 <RRSAgent> I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2018/02/28-social-minutes.html sandro
17:35:40 <ajordan> cwebber2: that is absolutely true
17:35:44 <sandro> forgot that bit
17:35:59 <sandro> RRSAgent, make logs public
17:36:15 <hellekin> ajordan: FYI one of the most prominent blockchain EU project, IOTA, made a presentation at an IoT EU meeting. After the presentation they were asked what technology they use. Their response was enlightening: "Well, we started with a blockchain, but we moved on to a Markov Chain Monte Carlo as it is more efficient."
17:36:15 <ajordan> AFAIK though proof of stake is the only alternative though, and I'm unaware of any successes there. I'm interested tho
17:36:44 <ajordan> hellekin: yeah I was thinking of that but I have heard really really bad things about IOTA
17:36:56 <tantek> ajordan, in general, there's no self-dogfooding in that space (aside from the climate abusing mining ops) so I'm treating it all as handwavy hype
17:37:12 <hellekin> well, that alone brings them redemption :)
17:37:30 <ajordan> tantek: in the blockchain space?
17:37:33 <tantek> yeah
17:37:46 <tantek> but they sure tweet about it alot (on silos :P )
17:39:15 <hellekin> blockchain and big data share the illusion that computers can record everything, and the more they record, the more 'is known'. But Giuseppe Longo, the mathematician, published a very interesting article in 2016 showing that the more data you have the more it resembles no data at all since spurious correlations appear.
17:39:22 <saranix> my view on blockchains is generally when someone says: blockchains enable xyz, the truth is, blockchains enable xyz where you don't trust the government, but if you take that out of the equation, new functionality can be engineered based on existing meatspace government/civic trust to achieve the same effect if you do in fact trust your government (which most people, for the most part do, for better or worse)
17:39:54 <ajordan> tantek: hm my impression offhand is that a fair amount of people selfdogfood but honestly I don't really care enough to pay attention
17:40:41 <hellekin> http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/files/BigData-Calude-LongoAug21.pdf -- Ah, it was 2017 ;)
17:41:02 <tantek> ajordan: not my impression. a fair amount "experiment", but no actual selfdogfooding (like depending on it for their own selves day to day)
17:41:04 <ajordan> saranix: right
17:41:13 <ajordan> tantek: I'll take your word for it then lol
17:41:29 <tantek> ajordan, you don't have to. my word is merely doubt in the absence of evidence.
17:41:43 <ajordan> fair enough
17:42:07 <tantek> and there's plenty of easily discoverable counter-evidence, e.g. search for any/all blockchain tweets and find zero instances of any of that being selfdogfooded
17:42:58 <tantek> I would say something similar about people tweeting about federation, but in that case there are some (still a small minority) self-dogfooding
17:45:08 <ajordan> https://lobste.rs/s/hqtwf4/9_billion_startup_stripe_drops_bitcoin#c_vp9nb7 somewhat relevant lobste.rs thread
17:46:42 <tantek> interesting. but then didn't Venmo *add* Bitcoin?
17:48:44 <ajordan> no idea
17:48:50 <tantek> not Venmo, Square
17:49:18 <ajordan> I know Valve stopped letting you pay for Steam merch with it too because it was waaaay too volatile
17:49:40 <tantek> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-31/square-rolls-out-bitcoin-trading-to-almost-all-cash-app-users
17:52:45 <tantek> ajordan, OTOH, this kind of stunt I can appreciate: https://tulipcoins.github.io/ (no I don't own any)
17:53:47 <tantek> "Tulipogenesis / We are currently in a crypto mania phase , What is a mania without some tulips. This is tulipcoin, to remind us of what irrational exuberance can do to our logic and thinking."
17:56:23 <ajordan> hellekin: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/967756467565719552 finally found the IOTA thing I was thinking of
17:56:23 <Loqi> [@matthew_d_green] The use of a broken hash function would have been a critical vulnerability if their network was actually decentralized, says Iota’s founder. https://twitter.com/c___f___b/status/966406693637693440
17:56:38 <ajordan> it's all over Matt Green's Twitter
17:56:53 <ajordan> tantek: incredible tbh
17:56:55 <tantek> what "it"?
17:58:04 <ajordan> "it" meaning the quality of IOTA known in the common vernacular as "being an absolute raging dumster fire, according to cryptographers"
17:58:55 <tantek> perhaps a good example of why *not* to standardize on any one particular hash function? E.g. IPFS, dat, et al
17:59:06 <ajordan> also if we're looking for the most ridiculous chain: https://lobste.rs/s/zy874g/memeschain_own_monetize_memes_with_power
17:59:24 <ajordan> > MemesChain: own & monetize memes with the power of blockchain & AI
17:59:37 <ajordan> tantek: what do you mean?
18:00:05 <tantek> all those so-called "decentralized" efforts assume standardizing on a particular hash function
18:00:46 <ajordan> I'm still not clear on what you think the problem is
18:00:54 <ajordan> you mean, the hash function is used as an id?
18:00:59 <tantek> exactly what the tweet said
18:02:04 <ajordan> ah so having the security of the whole system rest on a single hash function?
18:02:07 <tantek> standardizing something decentralized on a hash function leaves you open to the vulnerability of a broken (eventually cracked my someone) hash function and thus a "critical vulnerability"
18:02:17 <tantek> that sounds like what the tweet is saying
18:02:23 <tantek> and s/security/integrity but yeah
18:02:29 <ajordan> right
18:02:52 <tantek> in IPFS, if you can crack its hash, you can *replace* so called static content and thus corrupt anything in the "FS"
18:03:12 <ajordan> I mean if you read the whole thing basically what was going on was IOTA invented their own hash function that wasn't cryptographically sound, and then did such a poor job handling a researcher's responsible disclosure that it blew up
18:03:13 <tantek> in dat, if you can crack its hash, you can *update* any content
18:03:19 <saranix> I like cwebber's Proof of Bikeshed -- though I haven't been able to figure out how it's technically feasible yet
18:03:19 <tantek> both of which are pretty bad
18:03:36 <ajordan> okay I see what you're saying
18:05:00 <ajordan> and I hear you but I'm having trouble thinking about how that would actually work in practice
18:06:43 <ajordan> hm
18:06:50 <tantek> in both cases you inject your synthesized content that causes hash collisions into the "networks" and presto, chaos
18:07:05 <ajordan> I mean TLS gets attacked all the time but in that case you're not relying on something *forever*, TLS can be patched because connections are ephemeral
18:07:32 <tantek> precisely, ephemeral use is very different than persistent (supposedly "forever") use
18:07:38 <tantek> and crypto != hash btw
18:07:56 <tantek> last I checked, TLS didn't depend on a single hash function
18:10:00 <ajordan> right I wasn't making a point when I said that, just thinking out loud
18:12:00 <melody> i continue to have 1,000,000+ things to say on the dating topic, but not sure if people were interested in continuing to discuss that async here or if we are just buried in blockchain nightmares now 😛
18:12:18 <tantek> right, I was agreeing with you :)
18:12:19 <tantek> melody, please save us from blockchain nightmares
18:12:58 <ajordan> tantek: this is very interesting to think about, thank you
18:13:15 <ajordan> not totally sure if I agree with you but it's thought-provoking
18:13:39 <ajordan> ahh gotcha
18:14:08 <ajordan> +1 for saving us from the nightmare
18:14:30 <tantek> ajordan: TBH it's not that interesting, except in the sociology of hype bubbles, that's the problem. it's also a good way to filter-out tech proposals / projects / threads / discussions.
18:14:32 <ajordan> although I have to get lunch soon and then head to class
18:15:27 <ajordan> tantek: well, it's not super interesting in itself, but it's challenging some ideas I have about (cryptographic) design
18:21:18 <hellekin> ajordan: this is especially staggering http://www.tangleblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/letters.pdf
18:24:31 <ajordan> hellekin: wow
18:24:37 <ajordan> that's, uhhh
18:24:53 <ajordan> overall a massive bummer
18:53:17 <evanpro> melody: I think there is still a lot to talk about and I'm happy to do it async here
18:53:23 <evanpro> Although I'm about to go to the gym
18:54:08 <evanpro> melody: I think I'm mostly worried that your objections make this topology DOA
18:54:31 <evanpro> Like, if we can't separate profile hosting from searching/scanning, then having a distributed model might not make sense
18:57:31 <melody> yeah and there's a few other things i haven't mentioned yet -- like if you look at how OKCupid handles search, there's a setting on your profile if you have selected some of the more "advanced" gender options, for choosing whether to be grouped in results for men, women, both(?) or neither, partially for compatibility reasons -- but if the search was crawler based you would need to make sure engines respected that kind of profile hinting or else you
18:57:31 <melody> could end up with some pretty serious misgendering situations and/or significantly less useful results
18:58:50 <melody> and the gender vocabulary is not at all fixed and neither is the categorization scheme so you run into a risk of building software that really needs to semantically understand a vocabulary that is in pretty radical flux socially right now
19:04:53 <saranix> "radical flux" quite
19:07:48 <melody> the sex/gender distinction is one which is....debatable, one of the areas of social flux....but OKCupid is still just asking for gender -- the reason for the "group me with" options is so that if somebody adds a nonbinary gender but also considers themselves to be a man/woman, they can ensure that they show up in results for people looking for men/women and not just specifically "genderfluid" or "bigender" or "nonbinary", as a for-instance, and for
19:07:48 <melody> backwards-compatibility with people whose profiles were set up before the additional gender and sexuality options were created
19:10:01 <melody> it does have some flaws and it makes more than a small handful of potential category errors (for example, "transgender" is a potentially standalone gender option, which isn't really common in the current social justice vocabulary) but it does so for maximum expressiveness -- being flexible was more important than being correct
19:10:01 <saranix> not really debatable, linguistically and scientifically they are separate concepts. If society wants to start mashing them together for political reasons, then that's a different story.
19:10:47 <melody> science is not apolitical, linguistically they've been conflated for a long time and that is super duper varied across languages, cultures, and time periods, but this isn't really the time or place for that argument
19:11:53 <melody> or maybe it is but i don't really want to have it personally here and now
19:12:42 <saranix> fair enough
19:12:55 <melody> and the fact that we could have a lengthy discussion about whether that statement is true or not and both sides would have merit means i'm probably right on the debatability ;)
19:13:53 <saranix> you would be if I was willing to concede your argument had merit ;-)
19:15:08 <melody> at the very least -- we live in a world where it's plausible that two federated dating platforms may make different choices about whether or not they wish to support such a distinction for "purely political" reasons
19:15:27 <melody> so it might as well be debatable for the purposes of this
19:15:43 <saranix> lol
19:15:44 <melody> there won't be perfect category or semantic agreement
19:16:38 <melody> and a dating platform is in a lot of ways socio-political as would be any vocabulary defined to support making one
19:17:53 <saranix> it's funny because in this space, it wouldn't actually be that surprising if there was a platform out there that was super-specialized and has only a handful of users that then forks into 2 platforms because of a silly issue like that
19:18:22 <melody> so there will need to be some way to resolve this -- search and criteria creation will need to manage to accommodate potentially irreconcilable vocabularies for pretty centrally important profile fields
19:18:37 <melody> that's gonna make interop hard
19:19:16 <melody> in the ways that it's currently hard when fields get overloaded for unexpected uses when the spec isn't precisely defined enough
19:19:51 <melody> "fudge it and hope for the best" might end up being good enough for basic purposes
19:20:23 <saranix> history shows that ends in lowest-common-denominator 0 functionality
19:20:58 <melody> yeah, so that's kind of an issue
19:22:07 <tantek> FWIW I fought for (based on examples gathered and plenty of others' arguments) being able to specify gender and sex fairly independently in vCard4: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6350#section-6.2.7 - which downstream uses (e.g. h-card in microformats / indieweb, and vCard vocab in AS2) should "automatically" get, as long as they don't screw it up by misguided "optimizing"
19:23:46 <saranix> melody: https://xkcd.com/1095/ concept comes up a lot in here
19:23:47 <Loqi> [XKCD] Crazy Straws https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/crazy_straws_2x.png
19:24:54 <melody> tantek: so how to define sex "biologically" is another open question, depending on who you ask it's chromosomal, reproductive, hormonal, phenotypical (using primary or secondary sex characteristics) or some conglomeration of the above -- so you could still end up with semantically irreconcilable fields with compatible value sets
19:25:00 <tantek> examples and more research documented here (that helped convince the vCard folks) http://microformats.org/wiki/gender-examples
19:25:02 <Loqi> gender examples
19:25:56 <tantek> melody, indeed, there are always more details, but this was a huge step forward as compared to gender: M | F which is where it started :/
19:26:50 <melody> of course, and i definitely do NOT want to undermine the value of that, being able to self-report more accurately is especially good for that use case -- for dating it's just got added complications
19:29:15 <melody>  if for example a trans woman reasonably self-reports as F and finds herself on a platform that (wittingly or unwittingly) makes her discoverable to users on a platform for trans-exclusionary folks, where they have a different notion of what "biological sex" means, that could open her up to harassment or danger when communication goes out-of-band if that miscommunication isn't surfaced beforehand somehow
19:29:58 <melody> so it's not trivial to just handwave that away
19:30:12 <tantek> agreed
19:30:13 <melody> vcard doesn't really have the same risks
19:32:07 <tantek> the hope with vcard4 was/is that at least some (more?) sites/networks would start with vCard4's expressiveness as a baseline to help mitigate some of the likelihood of some such problems
19:34:26 <melody> it's not a terrible compromise, i'm just raising the risks of treating it as sufficient when applied to this particular use case where questions like this become more central than tertiary
19:35:05 <tantek> no implication of sufficiency, more like, here's a step forward, can we use this, learn, iterate, refine, improve?
19:38:42 <saranix> not to forget the 1 in 1500 ambiguous intersex born every year
19:42:58 <tantek> saranix, quite the contrary, explicitly listed in the examples in RFC6350 6.2.7 cited above
19:44:18 <melody> i think ultimately some of these differences are so fundamentally irreconcilable and use a vocabulary that is so overloaded that disambiguating them safely won't be possible, but that will mean a search model that respects federation boundaries so that instances can choose not to interop with nodes that have incompatible values
19:44:45 <melody> and closes of discoverability outside those boundaries
19:44:57 <melody> it will mean smaller more closed networks
19:45:12 <melody> rather than one big 'verse
19:45:33 <melody> and that has a lot of other implications
19:47:06 <melody> i also think detecting a mutual match *before* allowing private messaging is probably going to be necessary (at least on a lot of these platforms) to mitigate harassment and unwanted messages due to different interaction patterns though it's possible some networks could get by without that
19:48:17 <melody> but that means a way to represent that will probably need to be part of an initial feature buildout
19:49:38 <tantek> is it possible to cut out or supplant the middle-man for such detection? i.e. a peer to peer protocol for "detecting a mutual match"?
19:49:49 <melody> i don't know
19:50:02 <saranix> there are some crypto algos which might apply
19:51:36 <saranix> but strict match may be the only compatible algo and that's not the best for dating really
19:52:22 <melody> an instance could possible query a special feed or endpoint checking for directed like/interaction request activities on both sides
19:53:14 <saranix> services could proliferate, similar to TTY type services for deaf, etc. where people filter the initial contacts for you
19:53:51 <saranix> similar in the MITM way
19:54:08 <saranix> whether human or AI
19:54:14 <saranix> "someone"
19:54:22 <melody> there are a few dating apps that have tried to piggyback off of your existing social graph one way or another -- i think coffee meets bagel used to be one of them but they underwent a radical pivot at some point
19:54:46 <tantek> aside: is there a non-gendered term for MITM?
19:57:06 <melody> i don't know that i've heard one
19:57:21 <saranix> it is non-gendered. Maybe speciest.. Monkey-In-The-Middle
20:05:49 <melody> but yeah basically i think the most viable iteration of this probably involves clusters of mostly-closed networks of nodes that all only really interoperate with one another and search needs to be implemented within that sort of an environment, with most-to-all data being non-public without authorization -- maybe individual users could choose for some of their data to be more broadly discoverable to some kind of more general crawler? doing this well
20:05:49 <melody> probably involves maintaining multiple actors to contain different publicity levels for profile data
20:09:34 <melody> is it possible that federated.dating/user could disambiguate between and http-redirect to federated.dating/user/public-profile or federated.dating/user/network-profile or federated.dating/user/instance-profile or federated.dating/user/match-profile based on soooome kind of authorization cues provided by users and the platform?
20:10:14 <melody> (those are just example publicity levels i rolled off  the top of my head)
20:13:06 <saranix> there of course will be those people that prefer to do everything super-public too... like the people who record every moment of their life and publish it and stuff would certainly have no issue about a public dating profile, they might even thrive on it
20:15:57 <saranix> melody: hubzilla supports multiple profiles out-of-the-box ... actually I think the creator had dating in mind when he did it. Also good for job hunting, etc.
20:17:49 <tantek> saranix, perhaps an example of such a public profile on their own site no less: https://vanderven.se/martijn/
20:17:50 <Loqi> Martijn van der Ven
20:22:49 <saranix> very interesting
20:23:31 <melody> yeah, i just think that if you have any aspirations of supporting heterosexual matchmaking on a decentralized dating platform based on activitypub you are going to need to solve a few problems around making sure women have any reason at all to opt in and  won't be chased away by an absolute deluge of unwanted messages -- LGBTQ+ use cases and needs are wildly different but sometimes served by similar tech, and the polyamory crowd has a whole other
20:23:31 <melody> pile of needs that are absolutely not met anywhere at present, and another different set for kink/fet folks, but even if you only want to serve the biggest most obvious use case first, your MVP to set yourself up for success isn't that minimal
20:29:00 <csarven> tantek I'm impressed by the amount of work/detail Marijn put in his profile eg link to the definition of u-pronoun used in source: http://wiki.zegnat.net/microformats/pronoun , and explanation of "it is complicated" https://vanderven.se/martijn/gender/
20:33:21 <melody> like, initially i guess your problem will be getting any opt-in at all and making anyone talk to each other, but if you hit any level of success your next problem will be women not just staging a mass exodus if you can't mitigate this (which is even worse and more common on platforms that don't require a mutual match to message) http://straightwhiteboystexting.org/ (though i suppose this really surfaces that problem mentioned earlier about
20:33:21 <melody> circulating screencaps...)
20:36:22 <melody> in the UI i guess you could toss things into separate inboxes based on whether or not you've liked somebody, and try to get profiles for people who have sent messages out in front of users when they're browsing so that they can pass judgment on them, and move into a more visible inbox.....but idk, my mind continues to race along but i need to take a break
20:44:10 <melody> note about the above before i do: if standardized inboxes for this could be supported via protocol extensions that would be better than requiring the client to do that work, otherwise somebody changing clients might suddenly find themselves burried under a mountain of messages that their normal client had been sensibly protecting them from
20:59:44 <martijnvdven> I was just informed people were talking about me behind my back?! ;)
21:04:33 <martijnvdven> csarven, I am still not sure if my microformats property for pronouns is at its best yet. But it is really hard to codify language. I think I did the right thing by taking a step back and not try to “fix” it for all systems ever. Though I would be interested to see if anyone has been doing something like it in activitypub.
21:04:51 <martijnvdven> Sadly I do not think AP/AS was on my radar when I was reviewing my use of pronouns.
21:10:50 <martijnvdven> I find the (decentralised) (online) dating question to be an interesting one. But haven’t really looked into it. There is some really rough code on my homepage that lets people “swipe right” though.
21:49:52 <csarven> martijnvdven: Looking at the mf/pronoun again... Took a little look around to familiarise myself because I'm not at all very familiar with the stuff. Correct me if I've misunderstood something: I think going with u-pronoun works well-enough in that you point to a dictionary (a "controlled" set) for possible values. I don't know if p-pronoun is useful or even meaningful in that it'd allow you to do something similar but with free text. Is there a practice
21:49:52 <csarven> around signalling to consumers to use let's say "xy", "eh" instead of "he" ?
21:51:06 <csarven> Second: the limitation of the way you are using u-pronoun is that there is no way to differentiate between "he" and "they" for the consumer.
21:51:22 <csarven> ie. machine consumer
21:52:52 <martijnvdven> I couldn’t find any consumers for the old way mf pronouns were done, and as far as I know there are no consumers for my way of doing it. Actually had a really hard time finding *any* machine consumers.
21:52:52 <martijnvdven> Tempted to say machine consumers should go with the first found pronoun that they know how to use. Assume the publisher put their pronouns in order of preference (as I do)
21:54:30 <martijnvdven> It is really hard to please machine consumers though. E.g. what if I only publish my profile in Swedish? An English consumer could still pick out things like my name and address, but it probably cannot handle my Swedish pronoun anyway unless a list of translations exists.
21:55:09 <martijnvdven> (Picking Swedish here as an example as it has a somewhat established non-gendered pronoun “hen”, which non of the other languages I speak offer.)
21:59:57 <saranix> whenever I've come across machine parsing of pronouns it's always given as all 6 declensions in the subjects native language
22:01:37 <martijnvdven> saranix, but what if you have over 10 declensions? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/h%C3%A4n#Inflection is the example I give on https://wiki.zegnat.net/microformats/pronoun
22:02:09 <martijnvdven> You can’t be making it easier for parsers by having completely different numbers (and names/properties) for every language you want to support
22:03:12 <saranix> it comes down to how they are used. When you need to know someone's pronoun, what situation do you need it translated to anything?
22:03:26 <martijnvdven> There isn’t really such a thing as “all 6 declensions”, because languages aren’t the same.
22:04:04 <martijnvdven> That’s also a good question I guess. I just want people to know my pronouns when they write to or about me. Therefore I decided that links to wiktionary would be a great way to help people along.
22:05:43 <saranix> as for more than 6 declensions I don't know. I only know about 6 different languages, but sum total I would say I know about 0.95 languages ;-P
22:07:05 <saranix> IOW not 1 whole language between them
22:08:37 <saranix> I've heard of scenarios where even pluralities of numerals can get crazy in some languages
22:09:10 <martijnvdven> Yeah, I am not a linguist either. But I also do not expect people who visit my profile to be linguists. Yet another reason why I like to point at a dictionary for my pronouns rather than assume something like “he/him” would be understood.
22:09:55 <csarven> I realise you're doing mf, but have a look into this to to grab ideas http://www.lexinfo.net/ontology/2.0/lexinfo (eg search reflexivePersonalPronoun) - use http://rdf.greggkellogg.net/distiller to output different serializations that you prefer. Any way, perhaps more importantly, see the http://www.isocat.org/datcat/DC-* stuff that it refers to which I suppose where they grabbed their stuff from. I think that's similar to what you had with mf p-* with the
22:09:55 <csarven> difference that you can use for u- I think eg class="u-reflexivePersonalPronoun" href="wiktionaryURL"
22:10:52 <martijnvdven> Happy to give those things a look csarven!
22:12:28 <martijnvdven> 11pm here and closing IRC for the night, but if anyone has comments on my thought process for pronouns (https://wiki.zegnat.net/microformats/pronoun) or any of the other data I currently markup about myself, do mention me and I will get back on it :)
22:12:28 <martijnvdven> Going to be looking at possibly publishing some health data soonish so that will be interesting. Though maybe not for #social.
22:14:31 <saranix> health data?
22:15:22 <martijnvdven> Currently in the process of collecting all medical records I can get my hands on.
22:22:07 <csarven> :) have fun with data integration/normalisation
22:23:37 <csarven> I think I asked for some health data years ago on some checkup... perhaps related to the ligament getting pulled on my ankle. they gave me some CD with giant bitmaps of xrays and some other weird data which i had no way of opening.
22:24:13 <csarven> Do what Manu did: https://github.com/msporny/dna
22:24:14 <Loqi> [msporny] dna: Manu Sporny's genetic information (roughly 1 million SNP markers)
22:24:25 <csarven> create issues
22:25:33 <saranix> I have to go do some stuff. I'll be back an an hour or so.
22:56:09 <puckipedia> csarven: take it a level further: https://zenodo.org/record/995635 https://zenodo.org/record/995725
22:56:23 <puckipedia> `Raw DNA sequence data of an indivdual known as "whitequark"`
23:04:39 <csarven> ~80GB