#fedideveloperverse — Public Fediverse posts

It's been said a lot that tech people tend to think that every problem can be solved with a tech solution, and that that is often a wrong approach that ignores social dynamics and systemic causes.

That's true, but I can think of at least one problem here on the Fediverse that really, really needs a tech solution!

That being hashtags.

The whole point of hashtags is that you can tag your content with concepts it relates to, so that others who are interested in said concepts can discover your content.

Ideally, a hashtag should therefore contain all posts relating to the concept, and should not contain any posts unrelated to the concept. This is not the case.

The problem is that hashtags are plain text only. This causes two kinds of issues:

• False positives: One hashtag is used for multiple separate concepts, grouping unrelated concepts together.
• False negatives: Multiple hashtags are used for the same concept, meaning you might miss posts of a concept you want to see.

Common examples for false positives are homonyms (seating bank vs. financial bank, video games vs. board games), abbreviations (CNC, BBC, MTF), and multilingual issues (German handy vs. English handy).

False negatives are much, much more common, even. You're missing out on synonyms (horses vs. equines), grammatical and regional variations (colouring vs. coloring, horse vs. horses) and scope issues (gaming vs. games vs. video games) at least. Also, the whole thing about 'dogsOfMastodon' versus 'dogs'.

If you add to it that the Fediverse is multi-lingual, this is getting exponentially worse. If a German account posts about dogs using the hashtag 'Hund' (or Hunde, Hundes, Hunds, Hundi, Wauwau, Köter, Welpe, Welpen...), someone subscribed to the English hashtag 'dogs' should probably also see that post.

Rather than plain text which has all of these issues, a hashtag should therefore point at an individual unique ID of a concept, unique and unambiguous across all languages and grammatical forms.

Someone should be able to subscribe to the concept of a horse – the equine animal – and not just the letters 'horse' in that order!

That might sound daunting – who has a database of all concepts in the world? – but structured data actually is a super old problem that has been talked about for ages! The semantic web has it figured out.

Wikidata is an open data source for unique concepts, doing exactly what we'd need. Obviously it's easier said than done, but 'all' that the Fediverse needs to do is replace or extend hashtags with a system that allows you to link a Wikidata concept by UUID. And figure out what to do with things that don't have such a UUID yet, and how to handle UX. But it would be a vast improvement over plain-text hashtags.

I don't really want this post to just die in the ether, tbh, as posts are wont to do. I'd like to actually make this a thing. Is there anyone out there who knows what an implementation of this would take? I'd love to help (computational linguist).

#tech #technology #Fediverse #activityPub #socialMedia #hashtags #semanticWeb #wikiData #mastodon #goToSocial #fediSoftware #fediDev #fediDevelopers #fediDeveloperVerse #accessibility

It's been said a lot that tech people tend to think that every problem can be solved with a tech solution, and that that is often a wrong approach that ignores social dynamics and systemic causes.

That's true, but I can think of at least one problem here on the Fediverse that really, really needs a tech solution!

That being hashtags.

The whole point of hashtags is that you can tag your content with concepts it relates to, so that others who are interested in said concepts can discover your content.

Ideally, a hashtag should therefore contain all posts relating to the concept, and should not contain any posts unrelated to the concept. This is not the case.

The problem is that hashtags are plain text only. This causes two kinds of issues:

• False positives: One hashtag is used for multiple separate concepts, grouping unrelated concepts together.
• False negatives: Multiple hashtags are used for the same concept, meaning you might miss posts of a concept you want to see.

Common examples for false positives are homonyms (seating bank vs. financial bank, video games vs. board games), abbreviations (CNC, BBC, MTF), and multilingual issues (German handy vs. English handy).

False negatives are much, much more common, even. You're missing out on synonyms (horses vs. equines), grammatical and regional variations (colouring vs. coloring, horse vs. horses) and scope issues (gaming vs. games vs. video games) at least. Also, the whole thing about 'dogsOfMastodon' versus 'dogs'.

If you add to it that the Fediverse is multi-lingual, this is getting exponentially worse. If a German account posts about dogs using the hashtag 'Hund' (or Hunde, Hundes, Hunds, Hundi, Wauwau, Köter, Welpe, Welpen...), someone subscribed to the English hashtag 'dogs' should probably also see that post.

Rather than plain text which has all of these issues, a hashtag should therefore point at an individual unique ID of a concept, unique and unambiguous across all languages and grammatical forms.

Someone should be able to subscribe to the concept of a horse – the equine animal – and not just the letters 'horse' in that order!

That might sound daunting – who has a database of all concepts in the world? – but structured data actually is a super old problem that has been talked about for ages! The semantic web has it figured out.

Wikidata is an open data source for unique concepts, doing exactly what we'd need. Obviously it's easier said than done, but 'all' that the Fediverse needs to do is replace or extend hashtags with a system that allows you to link a Wikidata concept by UUID. And figure out what to do with things that don't have such a UUID yet, and how to handle UX. But it would be a vast improvement over plain-text hashtags.

I don't really want this post to just die in the ether, tbh, as posts are wont to do. I'd like to actually make this a thing. Is there anyone out there who knows what an implementation of this would take? I'd love to help (computational linguist).

#tech #technology #Fediverse #activityPub #socialMedia #hashtags #semanticWeb #wikiData #mastodon #goToSocial #fediSoftware #fediDev #fediDevelopers #fediDeveloperVerse #accessibility

It's been said a lot that tech people tend to think that every problem can be solved with a tech solution, and that that is often a wrong approach that ignores social dynamics and systemic causes.

That's true, but I can think of at least one problem here on the Fediverse that really, really needs a tech solution!

That being hashtags.

The whole point of hashtags is that you can tag your content with concepts it relates to, so that others who are interested in said concepts can discover your content.

Ideally, a hashtag should therefore contain all posts relating to the concept, and should not contain any posts unrelated to the concept. This is not the case.

The problem is that hashtags are plain text only. This causes two kinds of issues:

• False positives: One hashtag is used for multiple separate concepts, grouping unrelated concepts together.
• False negatives: Multiple hashtags are used for the same concept, meaning you might miss posts of a concept you want to see.

Common examples for false positives are homonyms (seating bank vs. financial bank, video games vs. board games), abbreviations (CNC, BBC, MTF), and multilingual issues (German handy vs. English handy).

False negatives are much, much more common, even. You're missing out on synonyms (horses vs. equines), grammatical and regional variations (colouring vs. coloring, horse vs. horses) and scope issues (gaming vs. games vs. video games) at least. Also, the whole thing about 'dogsOfMastodon' versus 'dogs'.

If you add to it that the Fediverse is multi-lingual, this is getting exponentially worse. If a German account posts about dogs using the hashtag 'Hund' (or Hunde, Hundes, Hunds, Hundi, Wauwau, Köter, Welpe, Welpen...), someone subscribed to the English hashtag 'dogs' should probably also see that post.

Rather than plain text which has all of these issues, a hashtag should therefore point at an individual unique ID of a concept, unique and unambiguous across all languages and grammatical forms.

Someone should be able to subscribe to the concept of a horse – the equine animal – and not just the letters 'horse' in that order!

That might sound daunting – who has a database of all concepts in the world? – but structured data actually is a super old problem that has been talked about for ages! The semantic web has it figured out.

Wikidata is an open data source for unique concepts, doing exactly what we'd need. Obviously it's easier said than done, but 'all' that the Fediverse needs to do is replace or extend hashtags with a system that allows you to link a Wikidata concept by UUID. And figure out what to do with things that don't have such a UUID yet, and how to handle UX. But it would be a vast improvement over plain-text hashtags.

I don't really want this post to just die in the ether, tbh, as posts are wont to do. I'd like to actually make this a thing. Is there anyone out there who knows what an implementation of this would take? I'd love to help (computational linguist).

#tech #technology #Fediverse #activityPub #socialMedia #hashtags #semanticWeb #wikiData #mastodon #goToSocial #fediSoftware #fediDev #fediDevelopers #fediDeveloperVerse #accessibility

It's been said a lot that tech people tend to think that every problem can be solved with a tech solution, and that that is often a wrong approach that ignores social dynamics and systemic causes.

That's true, but I can think of at least one problem here on the Fediverse that really, really needs a tech solution!

That being hashtags.

The whole point of hashtags is that you can tag your content with concepts it relates to, so that others who are interested in said concepts can discover your content.

Ideally, a hashtag should therefore contain all posts relating to the concept, and should not contain any posts unrelated to the concept. This is not the case.

The problem is that hashtags are plain text only. This causes two kinds of issues:

• False positives: One hashtag is used for multiple separate concepts, grouping unrelated concepts together.
• False negatives: Multiple hashtags are used for the same concept, meaning you might miss posts of a concept you want to see.

Common examples for false positives are homonyms (seating bank vs. financial bank, video games vs. board games), abbreviations (CNC, BBC, MTF), and multilingual issues (German handy vs. English handy).

False negatives are much, much more common, even. You're missing out on synonyms (horses vs. equines), grammatical and regional variations (colouring vs. coloring, horse vs. horses) and scope issues (gaming vs. games vs. video games) at least. Also, the whole thing about 'dogsOfMastodon' versus 'dogs'.

If you add to it that the Fediverse is multi-lingual, this is getting exponentially worse. If a German account posts about dogs using the hashtag 'Hund' (or Hunde, Hundes, Hunds, Hundi, Wauwau, Köter, Welpe, Welpen...), someone subscribed to the English hashtag 'dogs' should probably also see that post.

Rather than plain text which has all of these issues, a hashtag should therefore point at an individual unique ID of a concept, unique and unambiguous across all languages and grammatical forms.

Someone should be able to subscribe to the concept of a horse – the equine animal – and not just the letters 'horse' in that order!

That might sound daunting – who has a database of all concepts in the world? – but structured data actually is a super old problem that has been talked about for ages! The semantic web has it figured out.

Wikidata is an open data source for unique concepts, doing exactly what we'd need. Obviously it's easier said than done, but 'all' that the Fediverse needs to do is replace or extend hashtags with a system that allows you to link a Wikidata concept by UUID. And figure out what to do with things that don't have such a UUID yet, and how to handle UX. But it would be a vast improvement over plain-text hashtags.

I don't really want this post to just die in the ether, tbh, as posts are wont to do. I'd like to actually make this a thing. Is there anyone out there who knows what an implementation of this would take? I'd love to help (computational linguist).

#tech #technology #Fediverse #activityPub #socialMedia #hashtags #semanticWeb #wikiData #mastodon #goToSocial #fediSoftware #fediDev #fediDevelopers #fediDeveloperVerse #accessibility

Since ​@[email protected] seems unable (or unwilling) to understand that many users desire the #FediVerse to be a place where opt-in is the normal and expected implementation for features such as #relays I propose that #fedidevelopers take up this call.

The problem: the implementation of relays lacks sufficient user-based controls. While users may (at least on platforms such as GotoSocial) add relays they desire to have their content sent to, there are no user based controls over relays configured at the instance level.

The current implementation appears to have unintended, and unconsidered consequences associated with it.

Ban evasion can likely be achieved through chaining relays together. We have already seen the unintended consequence of a relay following tags.pub leading to content being relayed non-consensually.

Something that has not been considered is potential damages to users in regions where political, social, or religious beliefs are sensitive topics need to maintain tight controls over where their content is sent. This is a case where the handling and relaying of posts needs to be 100 percent bulletproof.

The Solution: all platforms in the Fediverse should implement instance level relays in the following manner:

1. Instance level relays are disabled for all users on that instance.
2. User settings provide a list of the relays provided at the instance level.
   1. Users can opt to leave the relay(s) disabled, or
   2. They can choose to enable the relays they trust their content being sent to.

Through this implementation we avoid clunky workarounds like adding hashtags to profiles. Also, we make this feature more discoverable for new users who are unfamiliar with the conventions of the FediVerse.

I am unfamiliar with the #FEP submission process and requirements. Anyone willing to work with me on this, I would like to see this brought forth as a FEP.

#fedideveloperverse #fedideveloper #mastodon #gotosocial #misskeyworld #misskey #pixelfed #microdotblog #pleroma #sharkeydev
@alice @admin @gotosocial @Gargron

Since ​@[email protected] seems unable (or unwilling) to understand that many users desire the #FediVerse to be a place where opt-in is the normal and expected implementation for features such as #relays I propose that #fedidevelopers take up this call.

The problem: the implementation of relays lacks sufficient user-based controls. While users may (at least on platforms such as GotoSocial) add relays they desire to have their content sent to, there are no user based controls over relays configured at the instance level.

The current implementation appears to have unintended, and unconsidered consequences associated with it.

Ban evasion can likely be achieved through chaining relays together. We have already seen the unintended consequence of a relay following tags.pub leading to content being relayed non-consensually.

Something that has not been considered is potential damages to users in regions where political, social, or religious beliefs are sensitive topics need to maintain tight controls over where their content is sent. This is a case where the handling and relaying of posts needs to be 100 percent bulletproof.

The Solution: all platforms in the Fediverse should implement instance level relays in the following manner:

1. Instance level relays are disabled for all users on that instance.
2. User settings provide a list of the relays provided at the instance level.
   1. Users can opt to leave the relay(s) disabled, or
   2. They can choose to enable the relays they trust their content being sent to.

Through this implementation we avoid clunky workarounds like adding hashtags to profiles. Also, we make this feature more discoverable for new users who are unfamiliar with the conventions of the FediVerse.

I am unfamiliar with the #FEP submission process and requirements. Anyone willing to work with me on this, I would like to see this brought forth as a FEP.

#fedideveloperverse #fedideveloper #mastodon #gotosocial #misskeyworld #misskey #pixelfed #microdotblog #pleroma #sharkeydev
@alice @admin @gotosocial @Gargron