"Topics" and Services we can subscribe to

Shared Notes from the session

Roadmap

brief introduction of participants

  • Sebastian, redaktor CMS pretty much plans to use topics (hashtags and controlled), controlled will be in UI like #!controlledTopic

  • Adrian, librarian, skohub

  • schmittlauch: interested in global federation of hashtags
    had a Talk in the 2019 Conf :
    “Decentralised Hashtag Search and Subscription in Federated Social Networks” – Schmittlauch - ConfTube

  • lanodan: a Pleroma developer, like schmittlauch we’re interested in fixing hashtag federation/distribution

  • Michael: friendica dev, interested in hashtag federation as well (?)

  • Hamish: “federation as a network of trust” approach, using folksonomies, thinking about using categories and rules to forward tags to categories (e.g. kittens->cats)

  • Mayel, commonspub: I’ve been exploring this topic and have prototyped some code where topics are actors which you can at mention and which redistributes those activities to followers of the category. But also working on functionality to make categories fork able (meaning the category is clone to the forkers instance,with a sameAs reference to the original

different kinds of “topics” and their use cases

  • categories
  • keywords/ hashtags: permissionsless, non-authorized, good for spontaneous acitvities
  • controlled vs. uncontrolled/ ad-hoc vocabulary
    • fixed set of topics
    • can be defined and published in SKOS and then be federated
    • problem: easy to censor

existing approaches

  • relay actors (as:Service)
    • mastodon/ Pleroma relays
    • Friendica does this
  • groups
  • hashtags

schmittlauch’s paper “Decentralised Hashtag Search and Subscription for Federated Social Networks”: https://git.orlives.de/schmittlauch/paper_hashtag_federation

seeAlso https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#microsyntaxes

desirable properties