Anyone else think a decentralized banner/link exchange standard is a good idea?
If you want to encourage your visitors to also visit somebody else's site, you should be able to do that by copying a single URL they provide. No third party needed.
That URL would point to a JSON document or something with the info you need to show link banners of various sizes. It could also list other sites you might want to support.
We could replace ads with a free and easy way to support each other.
@jamey @erosdiscordia wait a second. are we reinventing webrings?! because i’m in
@zaclittleberry Yeah, I'm coming at it from the perspective of webcomic creators since I've been running a centralized banner exchange for that community for a few years now, but I think lots of indie creators and social good orgs could use help with cross-promotion.
I think the first step is a WordPress plugin, probably, as proof of concept. That should be "simple" but unfortunately I'm not nearly comfortable enough with the WordPress plugin API...
@jamey Cool! I definitely think it should be open source and support smaller instances that are topic focused. That way different communities could run and join what makes sense for them. My immediate thought is that it could run off of ActivityPub (small independent instance subscription) or maybe something with .well-known directory (that feels very manual, and like a discovery mechanism. so, not sure). A WP plugin to make it easy is great, but I also think the arch. is first. @alana thoughts?
@zaclittleberry @jamey WP plug-in is a good target — Jamey, are comics folks on WP mainly still using comicpress ? i bet times have changed since i was up to speed on that 😅
and yeah Zac, i agree about arch — sketching it is always such a useful discussion-prompt, and going from ludicrously over-simplified to refined seems to do half the work of the subsequent steps (bucketing things into their own features/functions; flagging areas that smell potentially annoying; prioritizing… blah blah… 😊)
@alana @jamey I'm thinking of this as possibly a pixelfed mod with a wordpress pixelfed integration? will run with that. Time limited story albums with each image being one of a set of sizes. 'Network' accounts that aggregate and re-boost other accounts. The accounts you are subscribed to are the ones you boost/rotate display. The ones subscribed to you are boosting. Some optional rules about follow-back and spam prevention maybe (prevent post overwhelming). I think this could work.
There are accounts 1, 2, 3, and 4. 4 is labelled "Community Booster". Reciprocal follow arrows exist between 4 and 1, 4 and 2, and 2 and 3. Accounts 1, 2, and 3 have Created/Sent Posts A, B, and C, respectively. When Account 4 follows another account, 4 boosts that account's Created/Sent Posts, so Boosts A, B. (A Boost is a combination of receiving a post and then sending it as if it created it). Account 1 therefore has Displayed/Received posts A, B. Account 2 Posts A, B, C. Account 3 Post B.
There is also a "Modification(?)" key for some of the Displayed/Received Posts (dealing with a modification around an accounts own posts). Should Account 1 not Display Post A? Should Account 2 not Display Post B. Alternatively/inversely, should Account 3 actually display Post C?
A Post contains several images at standardized sizes with info about it being valid until YYYY/MM/DD. Example sizes might be:
Square (b x b)
Banner (c x a)
Sidebar (a x c)
@zaclittleberry @alana nice! 😄
Here are my notes; hopefully they make some kind of sense.
https://demo.codimd.org/s_Kw9tGATXqA8gg1MmblAg
I am... skeptical that the benefits of ActivityPub are worth its complexity for this, but I'm certainly open to being convinced 😄
@jamey @alana I think the diagram/concept I proposed would fit your first three items under 'Use Cases' with account following, community booster following, and boosting an individual account's content (which I didn't explicitly diagram, but smaller scale concept of a community booster, which would probably be automated). The 4 use cases after those however are more algorithmic/analytics based and I'm not quite as sure about. Also your discovery section aligns with activitypub as well I think.
@jamey @alana Using ActivityPub was to get de-centralization, and federation/interoperability, and I think some existing Instances of activity pub (such as Pixelfed) could be forked/modified to get this working quickly. I also lean towards standardized models for non-centralization/federation vs yet-another-independent-spec.
@zaclittleberry @jamey i wish i wasn’t on the road today 😩 will read thru later!
@zaclittleberry @alana Thanks for your comments! Now that I've had a chance to review and think about them, I've added my own responses, "-JS" suffixed.
That process helped clarify some of my hidden goals, like: if possible, I would like one or both sides of the protocol to be implementable on a purely static web site.
Also now I need to read papers like https://crypto.stanford.edu/adnostic/ and https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/323.pdf to see if there are usable privacy-preserving ways to choose the best banner to show…
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
@zaclittleberry @alana Oops, had to wander away from the keyboard for a bit.
I have ~1200 words of my more detailed thoughts about requirements and use cases that I could put up somewhere. I guess a public Etherpad or something? What do you like for collaborative text editing?