@trwnh@evan thanks, it seems like even if there is disagreement over whether 400e or 7888 is the preferred approach, alignment on implementations of context is important even between those who choose to implement 7888.
Prior our last task force meeting, @rimu brought up the need for a common nomenclature for ease of communication between ActivityPub implementors. Rimu also took the initiative to conduct an informal survey to see what terminology was used across fediverse-capable software (and some non-federating software).
Going beyond "toots" vs "posts", it was noted (not surprisingly) that each software has their own name for things.
The most common object type passed around via the ActivityPub protocol (as:Note) could be called a comment, a post, or a reply
A grouping of as:Notes could be a post (!!), a topic, a thread, a conversation, or a discussion
A higher order grouping of those could be a community, a category, a forum, a (sub)tag, a group, or a magazine
The main takeaways were that while there was occasional convergence, it wasn't entirely surprising that there were more names for things than things to name. Secondly, it was fairly clear that putting forth a recommendation to align on nomenclature would be fairly futile.
What were we expecting... naming things is, after all, one of the hard problems in computing.
All joking aside, up with a common terminology — a lingua franca (thanks @AaronNGray!) — definitely has some advantages.
What terms do you think communicate these levels of organization most succinctly? Let us know!
@trwnh Can you point me to the note that wasn't immediately picked up?
I can't say for certain, my guess is if it was just a self-reply (not mentioning anybody but yourself), Mastodon won't deliver it to me, since I wasn't inReplyTo or mentioned/tagged.
Got a #report about a user saying things that were upsetting people, noticed it was from another instance, realized that I had access to the actual account that had sent it. Not sure what this is or why, didn't even realize #ActivityPub supported signed reports (I'd honestly like to get more), but obviously that's a risky thing if they didn't know it was happening and didn't know why.
I kinda hate the fact that a lot of devs of this wonderful platform keep trying to change our unique name. We're called Fediverse for a reason, we want to be a federated universe. It's also just "more fun" to say than "Open Social Web"😴
Can we NOT try to change things that aren't broken? That'd be GREAT!
When @BeAware asks for help scaling out Mastodon because his SINGLE USER INSTANCE is falling over, and he reveals that he's paying for an 8 vCPU server with 16GB of memory, and all the comments are talking about tweaking postgres.
That kind of hardware is what we use for our most demanding enterprise level customers who were seeing 1000+ concurrent connections.
People ask us how to tweak Mongo or Redis to optimize NodeBB and 10 years in the answer is the same: the database is not your bottleneck (at least for us).
I don't have enough industry experience to say definitively, but when you start looking into tweaking your database to squeeze more juice out of it YOUR APP IS MAKING TOO MANY EXPENSIVE DATABASE CALLS.
@hrefna the thing is, it's an incredibly low bar to clear.
You probably knew this already, but I'm proud of how fast NodeBB is. However, it's not like we spent $10M+ (as @ryansingel shared re: twitter) solving this "hard problem".
@baris and I literally just spent a couple weeks optimizing our code to not do stupid things, batched calls if able, rewrote lower level calls to optimize, etc. and continue to keep efficiency back-of-mind when writing new code.
So to sit back and say "yeah there's nothing we can do about it, web apps are slow" is just wilful ignorance at best and learned helplessness at worst.
Easy to do fun things instead of tech debt; we didn't want to optimize NodeBB back then either, we just had a client breathing down our necks to fix it and fix it fast.
But Mastodon is not NodeBB from 10 years ago. This software is used by 1M times the amount of people that used NodeBB. Is that not motivation enough?