 So we are welcoming Elena of Valhalla, who will talk about the activity pub, so activity pub, peer tube, Mastodon, the future, so she will tell us more. Thank you. So I think that a number of people here probably care a bit about free software and that some or at least some of you care also of the more general problems of freedom in computing, not just the software that runs on one's computer but also when interacting with other platforms and where our data goes when we do something online, etc. And there are lots of problems that are around this area. Only few of which can be fully solved by only running free software on our own computers because nowadays we are spending lots of time in dealing with other people's computers and giving them the control of what is happening, even if on our side everything is free software. There is one specific problem in this area, which is social networks. So humans are social beings, so they like to have platforms that allow them to talk to each other, share things and whatever they want to share with other people. But most of the social networks nowadays are in the hands of a few companies that have shown many times that they can't be trusted with our data. Their main aim is to collect as much data as possible in order to sell it to advertisers. And they give us a service in exchange, so it's not a complete one-sided relationship. But they've shown that they are not able to give the data we are giving them the right care. So one thing that I recommend reading about this is the empire of oily regs by Curry Doctor who explains how big data from social companies are like a company that is collecting oily regs, squeezing out the oil and selling it. But of course this is an expensive project where they don't get as much money from each bit of oil they managed to squeeze out. So it only works if they can just put all the regs somewhere and if it takes fire it's somebody else's problem, which is what social network companies are basically doing with our data. There is a solution, well there is one solution which is avoiding social networks and it's not really a solution that a lot of people can actually use. There are some people who have family pressure to be able to share pictures of their children with their grandparents or anything. And there are also people who need this social interaction to be happy. So saying okay just avoid it is not a good solution. But there is another solution which is taking back social networks and bring it bring it back to being somebody by the people who use it use them for the people who use them. At least to some extent. This is something that has been happening for quite a long time. This is the first post on identica and it happened in 2008. So it's 10 years of free software social networks. It was based on free software. It could be installed by multiple people and all instances could talk with each other. This worked quite fine. Of course it was new software and it had problems. But the biggest problem was that it was a great play that the Fediverse or the universe of all platforms that allow to have a social network presence on your own server that federates, so talks with other people's servers. And it was a great place to talk about federated social networks and a tiny bit about free software. And that was it. The amount of people who were using this was quite little. It was a fun place to be if you were interested in federated social networks. And I have good time met a number of people. But if you had any other interest, you were just looking at something that weren't available for you. So it existed but it didn't solve most people problems. But at least it grew. It grew. And new projects were launched. There was Identica. There was Frendica. The Aspera were the early projects. Of course, they didn't talk with each other. So if you were on Identica, you could only talk with people on Identica. If you were on the Aspera, you could only talk with people on the Aspera. And if you were on Frendica, you could talk with other people as long as this was explicitly supported in Frendica. And as long as it didn't break, which happened quite often. Then time passed. And there were a few things that happened. The first thing was there were a couple of porn apocalypses where proprietary social networks decided to ban porn from their platform or other similar contents. And that helped a lot of getting new users. Because those new users created their own federated social network instance. And they also started to talk about other topics. So it wasn't just federated social network and porn, but it started to become federated social network, cat picture, or memes or anything else. And a bit of porn, but it's easy to filter it out. As you can see, the platform that was used a lot for this was Mastodon. And Mastodon came with content warning, the ability to prevent showing content if you don't want to see it, which helped with having an influx of people who wanted porn, but didn't take over the platform. Another thing that Mastodon had was the ability to pay somebody to host your own instance. Because one big problem that Identica had was that everybody was going on the Identica server. So there wasn't a real federated ecosystem. Everybody was just using one server. With Mastodon, a lot of people are using the main server, Mastodon.social. But there are also a lot of other instances. Some of them are big and created for some specific topic. Some are just a few people who decide, okay, we want to have our own social network instance. So we are not IT people, we are not CIS admin. We can pay somebody to do the CIS admin work and they just do the social administrator work, so banning people, listening to people's complaints, et cetera. The other good thing that happened was the activity pub specification, which is at least a standard that allows multiple platforms to talk to each other. It has some problems, but it has a huge advantage, which is it exists. And there are a few big platforms that already talk activity pub, mostly Mastodon. Then there were a number of smaller projects born especially last summer. It was called the summer of activity pub. And there were projects like pixel fed, well, a few others, which took activity pub and decided, okay, I want to make something that is useful, well, basically, I want to make Instagram free, free as in freedom, or I want to make a blog that talks activity pub and other projects like this. There is still one thing that is missing, and it is that activity pub as a protocol allows you to use as a client to server part and the server to server part. Most of the projects are implementing the server to server part. One thing that would be good to see, it started to have clients talking client to server that could use different servers that are maybe useful for microblogging or pictures or blogging, et cetera. Instead of having to have an account on Mastodon, if you want to do microblogging, on pixel fed, if you want to do, to publish photos, et cetera, if you want to have a blog or something else. So we have a number of projects. Some of them are already talking activity pub. Some are older and they are implementing it. Some are still using other protocols. Diaspora is still using the Diaspora protocol and as far as I know, they don't intend to migrate. But at least as far as projects are available, it's a good situation. It's quite active. People are starting to think about doing things that a commercial entity wouldn't be doing. And it's starting to grow something more. But there is quite a big problem that is that self hosting such projects is not easy. Some of them are meant for big-ish instances. So they think that you're going to have 100 or 1,000 users at least. If you have just four users, you can do it. But it's not really a good match. Then there are all web projects with lots of dependencies. And it can be hard to install and maintain them in time without breaking. So it would be nice having them in Debian. But as far as I know, of the one that talk activity pub, none of them are available. All of those RFPs are just RFPs, except for the friendica one who was an ITP but was forgotten. I don't know if they're still working. I asked probably too late to have an answer today. So I think it would be nice maybe to bring, to do some effort on that part. But it's something that is going to be hard because packaging web projects is hard. And I have to admit that I looked at them and I decided to do the wrong thing and write my own activity pub server, which probably will never work. But if it will, it will be easy to host. So I should have worked more on packaging. But sometimes people do what is fun rather than what is useful. So if you have any questions, if you want to, if you consider this important and want to help, thank you. Now there is a question. Okay. Hello. More than a question is a comment. In the Debian Publicity team publishes the small news via micronews.Debian.org. But these systems creates a Tom feed that can be pushed to different social networks. So for the networks that Elena explained, some people, members of the Debian Publicity team, care about the Debian profile in a certain social network. So we are in Mastodon. It's in the profilisdebian.at Fostodon.org. And we are also in Pampayo with Debian at Irentica. We are still keeping that account. And some other people ask about having a Debian profiling other networks, for example, the Aspora. It depends on somebody wanting to maintain the account and to keep that the feed is working and replying if there is any mention or everything. We try to focus in the micronews so the content is there at the correct time. And then we invite anybody that wants to maintain a Debian account in any federated social network to talk with us and to join the Publicity team. And that's all. Thank you. This was quite important to say. We wanted to do both tomorrow. So if somebody is interested in talking about activity pub, so we can find a place for you and you can discuss all together during the lightning talks or a little bit after. So don't hesitate to go and see Elena if you want to do this. You asked who is interested and would like to, ah, you asked who is interested and would like to help. I am, only I don't have time so that's a third item missing. But maybe someday. Do you happen to know because I managed to get rid of all the big social networks. The only thing I can't get rid of is Twitter because there are too many interesting things that I don't know how to get from other sources. Is there anything, any one of those networks that can just mirror all the stuff from mirror that I can say, monitor those Twitter feeds and show them and I don't want you to give any data to Twitter from me? Well, I don't think so. There are a few people on Twitter who also post on Masum. They're growing a bit more, of course in the context of software, technological things at the most. I don't think there is something automatic that takes things from Twitter and downloads it. Because that would require somebody to maintain it while Twitter changes the conditions, the API. I think that something has been tried and mostly failed. Exactly because you are working with somebody who doesn't want their content to go outside. So you should expect the APIs to change your application to be blocked. It may work for some time. You can also try to tell people who you are interested in. Well, why don't you also post on something else? Mostly in that case it would be Mastodon. For microblogging it's the biggest one. There are also tools to post both on Twitter and Mastodon at the same time. There are a number of accounts that use them and some of them aren't great accounts because on Mastodon they are mostly read-only, but at least the original posts are available. But, yeah, it's a hard problem because you are dealing with somebody who can be working against you, so Twitter. Yeah, especially I'm following the ongoing stuff with Fridays for Future and Climate Strike and it makes me very sad that especially those people, you send proprietary networks, proprietary chat infrastructure, everything proprietary. You may also tell them that on Mastodon there is quite a big community of people who are into those problems, those issues. There is a big community of self-sufficiently eco-anarchists or things like that. There are interesting communities on Mastodon from a social point of view. And then you had five requests for packaging some bugs there for the different systems. And have you made a list which of those might be the easiest to package or which are the problems to package so that if somebody has time, it knows, okay, where were the hurdles which is the most promising to start? Well, I think that Franbika may be good because it's PHP and as far as I know there aren't that many dependencies but then you have to maintain a PHP program. I wouldn't recommend Pampa.io because I don't know how much development it is anymore. Plurama is also promising as long as you know the language is written in it, which is Erlang I think. Okay, great. So as soon as you have time, you have a volunteer. Last question, is there any place in the Dabian wiki for example where I find this list of five ERPs and maybe anything else around Activity Pop and Dabian? I don't think so but I can make one this afternoon. Well, maybe tomorrow during the buff or at most in the next few days. Can I ask you a question? You mentioned, you almost mentioned this idea but so when I try to convince people using alternative social network, until now I recommended diaspora because some instances have this feature that when you post to diaspora, it can also post to a Twitter account that you linked and a Facebook account that you linked. But diaspora is not going to have Activity Pop soon. So do you know Activity Pop social networks who have this feature for forwarding posts to link the account on other social network or do you know external tools who can post to proprietary social network and also Activity Pop based social networks? I know that they exist but I don't know which one they are because I've never used them and they are the ones that post on Twitter and Mastodon at the same time. But I'm only on the receiving part seeing the posts on Mastodon so I don't know what the name of the tool is but I'm sure it exists because I'm seeing it used. So we have two more minutes if somebody else has questions. Thank you Elena. There is another kind of social network that uses Activity Pop, it's called Fankwale, I guess the right name. It's an alternative replacement for Groove Shark. I don't know if it's dead or if it's just proprietary but it's dead. But we would have liked to have the main author of the software but he's not here today but he's using Activity Pop and it can be blended with the rest of the community. Great, I didn't know about it. So his name is Elliot Berryot and Fankwale is like peer tube but for music. It's exactly the same idea and it's using Activity Pop and since September this developer is on his own, he left his job to develop full-time Fankwale so go and look at his project and he's on opencollectives.com so you can fund his job, his work if you want. So thank you Elena. Thank you.