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1. Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2017 05:15:32 EDT Mike Macgirvin
   Trying to come up with a workaround for Mastodon's brain-dead media behaviour. The only solution I've got currently is
   
   if(your friend is using mastodon)
     do the wrong thing
   else
     do the right thing
   
   The issue is that half the metaverse does the wrong thing; which is basically stripping media from HTML content and adding it back as attachments. This is fine for OStatus and public networks but doesn't work with privacy enhanced services because the messages need to be signed, If you mangle multi-media messages to work on these primitive nets it breaks the signature, so you're basically stuffed. The messages will not federate because the service your friends are using is doing the wrong thing. If you don't mangle the posts to fit that network's policies, the media content will be stripped. If you do mangle the content, the message won't verify and will be discarded.
   
   I do so wish that the people designing these protocols and systems would take a look at what the hell they're doing sometime. They're really screwing up everything for everybody.
   1. Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2017 16:15:35 EDT Mike Macgirvin

      in reply to
      I have a solution and it is permitted in the ActivityStreams specification so it's the right thing to do.  Basically, the microblog folks will send 'Note' activities (which somebody along the line took to mean *cannot* have embedded media) and we will produce 'Article' activities which are allowed to have embedded media.
   2. Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2017 20:25:19 EDT Mike Macgirvin

      in reply to
      @maiyannah Correct - and that's why we have a problem. Multi-media content is not restricted by ActivityStreams or ActivityPub. It is restricted by Mastodon's interpretation of unwritten rules and their own policies. This is why these 'specs' are so laughable - the things they specify aren't really important for anything that matters and the things they don't bother to specify are crucially important to inter-operation.
   3. Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2017 21:01:03 EDT Mike Macgirvin

      in reply to

      Even with a properly-formed spec I think we'd still be having mastodon-related issues, but that's my inner cynic speaking.

      
      
      @maiyannah Implementing ActivityPub was easy. I did that a month ago. Trying to figure out what Mastodon is doing with the data we send has consumed the last month and will probably consume the next six. The last 3 weeks everything we sent (legal ActivityPub) vanished into the bit bucket. I've only recently seen data arrive intact at the destination and can start working through the other platform quirks. I've told people time and time again that federation isn't about protocols. It's about projects and all their quirky policies that aren't written anywhere but are critical to working communication.
   4. Mike Macgirvin (mike@macgirvin.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2017 07:39:16 EDT Mike Macgirvin

      in reply to
      @mike They know what they're doing, Mike.  They just don't care about networks other than their own.