Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!
This observatory does not collect any user data or metadata. Instead I am looking at the *shape* (aka schema) of data being sent around the fediverse. This will let software devs ask questions like "How is a Mastodon 4.2.0 image post formatted differently from a Misskey 2024.7.0 image post?"
And we'll get real answers based on data rather than on poor documentation.
I won't be actually LAUNCHING this tool until I've found out how you all would feel about it being opt-out vs opt-in. I will provide a longer blog post for you all to read with details, but in short:
It would be really helpful for general interop on the fedi if this were opt-out. But if people are generally freaked out by having technical details about software data formats being opt-out... I'll make it opt-in.
Quick explanation of the data scrubbing in the attached images
@darius not a fediverse dev (yet I guess lol)
But I’d definitely vote for this to be opt out, cause it sounds really useful for if I ever did want to do fediverse dev, which I’ve definitely considered!
@darius why there's the new security context in mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/31871
I think that's a backport candidate, as the context was used but not actually present in the @context's object
Contexts included in activities are so far decided at serialization-time, but Linked-Data signature occurs after serialization time. In some cases, signed activities were missing the https://w3id.o...
@darius Hm. Am I reading it right you would be logging that person x made a post with URL y on date z?
that might interfere with some people's want to not have their posts seen off fedi; that info could be used against someone even if they delete it later. "why're you posting while on the clock" fer a basic example.
the "in reply to" field as well might expose the shape of who you talk to in a concerning way
edit: it's clear that I don't get it but will Try again after coffee
@t54r4n1 no, I am logging that "some person somewhere but I don't who or where because I threw away that data, made a post with a "URL" field that contains some kind of URL in it but I don't know what because I threw away that data"
I'm not even logging the time something was posted! Just "there is a time field in this and it contains a time but I don't know what time"
This looks very cool, thank you!
As an implementor, one of the additional things I'm curious about are the commonalities (or lack thereof) among the structure of various URIs. Would you be open to, for example, analyzing common prefixes in a single activity, to notice for example that the actor ID is or is not present as a portion of (say) the followers collection?
Darius Kazemi
coreyja
blaine
Jamie Booth
William Pietri
Emelia 👸🏻
In #Flancia we'll meet
Erin 💽✨
paramilitary organizer
Baessito 
☭🇧🇷🇺🇳🇵🇸
Jeremy Bornstein
Tim Chambers
Seth 🎙️
Evan Prodromou
Jenniferplusplus
django
groxx
Marco Rogers