The federated social web is living in its second golden age, after the original success of StatusNet and OStatus in the late 2000s.

A lot of this success has been around unification of adoption of a single protocol, #ActivityPub, to connect together the many different instances and applications into a unified network.

Unfortunately from a security and social threat perspective, the way ActivityPub is currently rolled out is under-prepared to protect its users.

In this paper we introduce #OcapPub, which is compatible with the original ActivityPub specification.
With only mild to mildly-moderate adjustments to the existing network, we can deliver what we call “networks of consent”:
explicit and intentional connections between different users and entities on the network.

The idea of “networks of consent” is then implemented on top of a security paradigm called “object capabilities”, which as we will see can be neatly mapped on top of the actor model, on which ActivityPub is based.

While we do not claim that all considerations of consent can be modeled in this or any protocol, we believe that the maximum of consent that is possible to encode in such a system can be encoded.

Paradoxically, what may initially appear to be a restriction actually opens up the possibility of richer interactions than were previously possible on the federated social web while better preserving the intentions of users on the network.
#NetworksOfConsent #ObjectCapabilities #security
https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub

“What if we’re making the wrong assumptions about our social networks? What if we’re focusing on breadth, when we really should be focusing on depth?” (@evan, paraphrased)

Something that has me transfixed with the #fedi right now is that I don't think I've even seen such deep debate of the social and ethical implications of software anywhere in social media before. Not at this pace, anyway. Any technical "feature" has moral implications, every political decision is looking for a technical implementation. And the ground keeps shifting under our feet.

Here's @cwebber on #OcapPub: "OcapPub: Towards networks of consent"

https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org

notes from the #ocappub session at #apconf can be found on this etherpad page:

https://redaktor.me/pad/p/ocappub

thx to @cwebber for moderation and @sl007 for the etherpad

Just read the OcapPub proposal[1] and seems like a good way to combat spam. I'm interested to seeing it implemented in the Fediverse.

[1] https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub

#ocappub