BLUEPRINT ActivityPub

ActivityPub is a new W3C Recommendation which provides a way to follow people on one social network using another. This is a major step forward towards putting people in control of their data online, and allowing for a true free-market of "social network" webservices to flourish!

Generally such a standard would not have much to do with Odysseus, it is for those social networks to implement (hoping beyond hope here that Facebook & Twitter jump onboard). But there are pain-points of using these federated social networks (as demonstrated by Mastodon) that Odysseus can help resolve while not taking on much bloat.

Sharing links

All of the toolbar buttons in Odysseus have hold/right-click dropdown menus. This is a little undiscoverable, but it is consistant with Pantheon Files and nicely tucks away less-used features behind strongly related toolbar buttons. Furthermore it is highly desirable to add a "favourite this page" toolbar button, and because of the previous point when I do so UI space will open up to fill it's dropdown menu. Filling this with share links feels very natural.

The share menu will be initially populated by your most frequent eMail contacts (sourced from Zeitgeist), but you'll be able to add any ActivityPub site you login to or any site you visit that specify a link-template in it's RDFa metadata. If a site provides both, the link template will take precedance for the purposes of the share menu, whereas otherwise it'll just near-silently "like" the page and notify you with a Toast.

Providing the link-templates may open up an opportunity for sites to bloat my UI, but then the limited functionality should help counteract that impulse. Besides maybe this isn't a terrible place for share with website to get archival, translation, etc services; it is abuse but not terribly so. But I would recommend the translation service integrates as a search engine so it can receive free-form text and show up under the addressbar.

Following

To install share-links, RSS/Atom feeds, search engines, user-scripts/styles, WebKit content blockers, etc, communicate which of these are actively altering the page you see, and show page permissions; I'll add icons to the righthand-side of the addressbar (gray for disabled, blue for enabled, orange for active on this site). It would be natural to similar style toggle-button here too for "following" ActivityPub pages so you can interact back with them via your choice of social network.

Clicking this button (or any "follow" links on the page) will either initiate the following process immediately, or bring up a menu of your different accounts which will then initiate the follow when clicked. The best way to detect these "follow" links is currently under investigation.

Furthermore once you've "followed" an ActivityPub actor, the follow icon will turn blue.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to @[email protected] on Mastodon for suggesting the idea of a browser plugin which does this sort of work, and for discussing these ideas with me.