@mediaarchaeologylab Oh, dang, I think my parents had one of those when I was little!

@andybaio :blobrofl:​ "people want to know what you have to say about ZALGO HE COMES (segmentation fault) - share your expertise!"

@kissane One aspect that seems to get folks into trouble, from what I've seen:

If you're federating properly with AP servers, they generally push content at your server. You don't need to go out and fetch it. And those servers will stop pushing content if you get blocked. That's kind of an implementation of consent in the protocol.

If your server is going out and pulling in content to ingest to then remix & republish, that's where trouble starts. I think that's what folks colloquially call "scraping" - even if technically it comes from RSS & JSON feeds and not literally scraped from HTML or other sources.

I'm not sure which of these Maven in particular did

@christa Personally, I'd say if you're pulling down RSS feeds for your own reading, there's no ethical problem per se? It's when folks pull down those feeds and then republish in new and unexpected contexts that hackles start to rise @kissane

@fraying I'd say the subtle distinction here is that the protocol delivers things from server to server on purpose. The push-based delivery is an intentional act, one server POSTing messages to the inbox of another. That's the heart of the protocol that differentiates it from something like RSS.

There is of course an outbox in the AP spec, and servers like Mastodon also provide RSS representations. I don't think those are generally intended by server admins as ingest sources for third-party indexing & republishing, though.

Like, sure, you can technically do it because most Mastodon instances don't have authorized fetch enabled, but it's often regarded as impolite to say the least

@evan Well, mainly things like actors and keys, right? Like, you're not generally fetching all the outboxen of all the servers you're interested in @kissane

That thing where I have a bad brain day and feel awful about not getting anything done despite trying really hard.

This, followed by a better brain day where I get little done and also feel not great about it - because I kind of feel compelled to just vibe with my better brain condition for awhile.

@bnys Oh dang, this is very relevant to my interests! Probably won't make it to Teardown, but I wonder if I can pry myself out of the house for a movie 🤔

Main reason my ears perk up about this Maven stuff is that I kind of want to build some search & custom feeds on the Fediverse too.

I have a notion that I can keep from getting yelled at. Because, I'd build a roach motel - what goes in doesn't come out.

Messages sent to me get piped in, stored in a local database. Indexed and collated with custom pluggable algos. But, for my eyes only, nothing republished.

All messages sourced from a websocket connection to a Mastodon server, same as the built-in web client. No fetching, no evasion of blocks or bans or defederation. All deletes honored.

I might even train a model or two, but just for my likes & boosts to recommend what I might like & boost in the future. Those personal models don't get shared.

I haven't built all this yet, haven't had the time. But, this feels like a decently polite system to me?

I also really want to play with like a WASM / WASI sandbox for shareable custom feed algos to sift through the federated firehose (i.e. share the algo, not the data)

@joncruz Haha, I was feeling better and so then I doomscrolled for an hour and am less better (huh I wonder what happened)

@mfinkle I don't think it's all that different? But, I do want to check my assumptions.

Also, RSS feeds are a bit different because they're sort of conventionally intended as public access - with the exception of, say, Patreon-style private feed URLs that come with an access key parameter.

Folks posting on Mastodon tend to have different expectations of where their postings end up - even if it turns out their server exposes them on public-access web resources. (which is a confusing & frustrating situation)

@yuki2501 That's a thing where, whenever I hear someone say "lol humans can't cause climate change 🤷‍♂️ " and I say "you better hope we can cause climate change, because we're going to want to fix it at some point"

Kinda want a version of nedroid's "I made this" where it goes like:

"I made this" "You made this?"
(hands over this) (hands over cash)
"They made this"

https://nedroidcomics.tumblr.com/image/41879001445

@a @selectric @bryan I miss when I used to know something important happened in a video game because suddenly the floppy drive started whirring and gronking

I keep looking for and failing to find a GIF of the old folks splashing happily around in the pool with the alien eggs in Cocoon (1985) - but, also, it feels like an ancient reference that very few folks would immediately get these days.