WEBVTT

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1, 2, 1, 2.

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All right, so we are exactly on time for Evan to talk to us about taxile up.

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Thanks, everybody.

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How you doing?

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Hey, Paul, if you're here, okay, get ready to go,

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because we're trying to do the lightning style.

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Yeah, so I'm going to talk to you about tax.gov.

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My name is Evan Podromo.

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I'm the research director at the social web foundation.

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I don't know what you look.

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This is my former friend, the mustache.

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I'm the co-author and current editor of the Activity Pub and Activity

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Streams 2.0 specifications at the W3C.

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I wrote the Activity Pub Programming for the social web book for O'Reilly.

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That is my Fediver's handle.

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My webfinger, you can find me and follow me there.

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It's nice and long.

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Evan Podromo at socialwebfoundation.org.

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I'm going to be talking about a project called Tax.gov,

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which is a domain name.

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However, if you go there right now, you're going to get some weird website.

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It doesn't exist yet, or maybe one of those like website doesn't exist.

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This is the link to find it.

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It's on GitHub under social web foundation.

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Tax.gov.

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So I just wanted to warn you before you go in there.

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So hashtags. They are so great.

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Hashtags are a really wonderful part of social networking.

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They give us a chance to coalesce around topics and ideas,

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concepts and movements instead of just connecting to other people.

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So they're an extremely important part of what makes social networks

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and social media special.

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However, on the Fediver's, we have mechanisms for following hashtags.

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But not everybody knows this.

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They're kind of random.

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When you're following a hashtag, you're not really following the hashtag

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across the whole Fedivers.

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You're following a certain subset of content that's been tagged

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with that hashtag.

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So if you're a person A in this picture,

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and you're on the same server, does this make sense as metaphor?

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You're on servers.

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You got people on servers that make sense?

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So A is on a server with B, and B follows C.

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So if C posts something under a hashtag, A is going to see it.

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If she follows that hashtag, right?

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So as long as we have a follow connection between two servers,

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those hashtags are followable.

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However, if there's no follow connection,

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like here across to the DNE server,

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that anything that E posts under the same hashtag

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won't go to A's inbox.

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That makes sense.

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So we have to have a follow connection between the servers

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in order to follow a hashtag across the Fedivers.

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Well, that's kind of suboptimal because we're trying to connect

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those communities across the Fedivers.

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So one way to work on this to solve it is to give those hashtags

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their own accounts on the Fedivers, on a separate server.

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This way, a person A can follow that hashtag on that separate server,

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and it's like as if she was following a real person.

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Thank you.

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And so the hashtags server can coalesce information

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through back channels from those other servers.

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And we aren't depending on social connections between people

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in order to propagate the hashtag content.

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So that's the idea behind tags.pub.

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That we give a hashtag its own account on the Fedivers

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that you can follow just like you follow a person.

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Like if you're following the hashtag hashtag,

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you would follow the hashtag at tags.pub system.

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Now, you might get a little spooked about what we're doing.

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There's nothing scary going on here.

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We're not sputtering, we're not doing mass following,

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we're not scraping, we're just using existing interfaces

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that are already used for sharing data across servers.

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And these are opt-in systems that servers choose the participate in.

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It's not an issue where they don't have consent.

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So the idea of bringing these servers together

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is things like relay interfaces.

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We have a special endpoint that's built into activity pub

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for delivering public consent.

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We are looking at per service APIs.

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Mostly I'm not excited about that, which you can see by my emoji,

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although some of the fast work might be interesting here too.

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Suffice it to say that we're going to be using pretty good systems

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that are opt-in and that are not forcing anyone to participate

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in a process that they're not interested in.

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The technology stack that tags that pub is built on,

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it's built on activity pub bot server,

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which is a server-side framework for my book.

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It uses activity streams at PM library.

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Thank you, James Snell, author of activity streams.

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It uses a big postgres SQL database,

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some love, a lot of hubris.

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So the way it works, when we get create activities,

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this is where I go into activity pub,

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most people look at falsely real quick.

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We get create activities.

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We take all the tags that are in the object,

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and we broadcast out from each of those tags.

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So we announce out from each of those tags.

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When we get an update, we announce some, we unenounce others.

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We're just taking a delta.

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We're making sure that we're keeping things up to date with that object.

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If something gets deleted, we unenounce it,

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so it goes off the network,

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and we re-enounce activities as if they were create activities.

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So it's a very straightforward use of activity pub.

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We are focusing on privacy.

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Mostly using public data with the expectation

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that if you post on a hashtag publicly,

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your intent is to share out with that community.

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We are using privacy respecting announce activities.

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So we only use links.

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So these are very, these respect blocking.

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So we will not expose your content to someone you've blocked

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through this announced mechanism.

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So this is not, so this is a very privacy respecting system.

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We're not storing any content.

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We're just getting the content,

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taking the hashtags, and re-sending out the announce activities,

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and perfect.

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We're not doing a search index.

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We do have an opt-out mechanism,

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and we have free and open source software as our code base.

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So our hope is that we get that well examined

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in case there's any concerns.

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We will be launching this system in March 2022.

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We're going to be working with server operators to figure out

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the best ways to share data.

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I've already started talking to a number of them.

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If I haven't talked to you, come talk to me.

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And then we're documenting interfaces

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to make it easier for folks to submit.

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And now question.

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We have 30 seconds.

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One minute.

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30 seconds of questions.

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So I got one question and then pull.

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Because we're in this sprint of three short talks.

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We've got so much time for questions.

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I find it nice with the text, but question is,

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why do you not extend it for more data?

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For example, in friendica, we've got possibilities to filter

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for stuff like offer name, offer platform, network types,

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stuff like that, and what, why?

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Can we, can this be extended to some kind of relay?

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System that could be done with really filters.

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I also posted this on the social hub,

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and stuff had a suggestion there.

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Okay.

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Sorry.

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I'm not going to read something.

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But what was the question you wanted to find out?

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Are there other content types?

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No, it's not only for text,

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question is, is this be expanded to more search terms,

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like all the name, all the platforms,

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stuff like that, all the content.

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We're not building a search system.

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We're building a tag just tags.

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That's the intent.

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Yeah.

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Okay.

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We could discuss maybe in a few minutes or whatever.

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Okay.

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I've got very extended ideas.

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Okay.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.