洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)

Hello, I'm an open source software engineer in my late 30s living in #Seoul, #Korea, and an avid advocate of #FLOSS and the #fediverse.

I'm the creator of @fedify, an #ActivityPub server framework in #TypeScript, @hollo, an ActivityPub-enabled microblogging software for single users, and @botkit, a simple ActivityPub bot framework.

I'm also very interested in East Asian languages (so-called #CJK) and #Unicode. Feel free to talk to me in #English, #Korean (#한국어), or #Japanese (#日本語), or even in Literary Chinese (#文言文, #漢文)!

#introduction

安寧(안녕)하세요, 저는 서울에 살고 있는 30代(대) 後半(후반) 오픈 소스 소프트웨어 엔지니어이며, 自由(자유)·오픈 소스 소프트웨어와 聯合宇宙(연합우주)(fediverse)의 熱烈(열렬)한 支持者(지지자)입니다.

저는 TypeScript用(용) ActivityPub 서버 프레임워크인 @fedify 프로젝트와 싱글 유저用(용) ActivityPub 마이크로블로그인 @hollo 프로젝트와 ActivityPub 봇 프레임워크인 @botkit 프로젝트의 製作者(제작자)이기도 합니다.

저는 東(동)아시아 言語(언어)(이른바 #CJK)와 유니코드에도 關心(관심)이 많습니다. 聯合宇宙(연합우주)에서는 國漢文混用體(국한문 혼용체)를 쓰고 있어요! 제게 韓國語(한국어)나 英語(영어), 日本語(일본어)로 말을 걸어주세요. (아니면, 漢文(한문)으로도!)

#툿친소 #연친소 #별친소

こんにちは、私はソウルに住んでいる30代後半のオープンソースソフトウェアエンジニアで、自由・オープンソースソフトウェアとフェディバースの熱烈な支持者です。名前は洪 民憙（ホン・ミンヒ）です。

私はTypeScript用のActivityPubサーバーフレームワークである「@fedify」と、ActivityPubをサポートする1人用マイクロブログである 「@hollo」と、ActivityPubのボットを作成する為のシンプルなフレームワークである「@botkit」の作者でもあります。

私は東アジア言語（いわゆるCJK）とUnicodeにも興味が多いです。日本語、英語、韓国語で話しかけてください。（または、漢文でも！）

#自己紹介

In fact, Hackers' Pub is a bleeding-edge testbed for Fedify. 🙄

Bookmarked: [brandon.si] Linking Smaller Haskell Binaries

https://brandon.si/code/linking-smaller-haskell-binaries/

See more links at https://abhinavsarkar.net/linkblog #linkblog #linkblogging

@z9mb1 Congrats! 🎊

Internationalise The Fediverse

We live in the future now. It is OK to use Unicode everywhere.

It seems bizarre to me that modern Internet services sometimes "forget" that there's a world outside the Anglosphere. Some people have the temerity to speak foreign languages! And some of those languages have accents on their letters!! Even worse, some don't use English letters at all!!!

A decade ago, I was miffed that GitHub only supported some ASCII characters in its project names. There's no technical reason why your repo can't be called "ഹലോ വേൾഡ്".

Similarly, I'm frustrated that Mastodon (the largest ActivityPub service) doesn't allow Unicode usernames and has resisted efforts to change.

So I built a small ActivityPub server which publishes content from an Actor called @你好@i18n.viii.fi - it is only a demo account, but it works!

Some ActivityPub clients report that they are able to follow it and receive messages from it. Others - like Mastodon - simply can't see anything from it. Take a look at the replies on Mastodon to see which services work. You can also see some of its posts on the Fediverse.

What Does The Fox Spec Say?

The ActivityPub specification says:

Building an international base of users is important in a federated network. Internationalization

I can't find anything in the specifications which limits what languages a username can be written in. But there are a few clues scattered about.

The user's @ name is defined by preferredUsername which is:

A short username which may be used to refer to the actor, with no uniqueness guarantees. 4.1 Actor objects

There's nothing in there about what scripts it can contain. However, later on, the spec says:

Properties containing natural language values, such as name, preferredUsername, or summary, make use of natural language support defined in ActivityStreams. 4. Actors

So it is expected that a preferred username could be written in multiple scripts. Which implies that the default need not be limited to A-Z0-9.

The ActivityStreams specification talks about language mapping.

Finally, the ActivityPub specification has some examples on non-Latin text in names.

So, I think that it is acceptable for usernames to be written in a variety of non-Latin scripts.

But What About...?

There are usually a few objections to "Unicode Everywhere" zealots like me. I'd like to forestall any arguments.

What about homograph attacks?

Well, what about them? ASCII has plenty of similar looking characters. I doubt most people would notice when a capital i is replaced by a lower L - and vice-versa. Similarly the kerning issue of an r and n looking like an m is well known. Are mixed language homographs more dangerous? I don't think so.

What if people make names that can't be typed?

Well, what if they do? Maybe not being found by people who can't type your language is a feature, not a bug. But, anyway, clients can let users search for other people, or copy and paste their names.

What about weird "Zalgo" text?

It is up to a client to decide how they want to render text input. The "problems" of strange Unicode combinations are well known. This is not a hard computer-science problem.

What about bi-directional text?

The spec makes clear this is allowed.

Do people even want a username in their own script?

I have no evidence for this. But I bet you'd get pretty frustrated if you had to switch keyboard just to type your own name, wouldn't you? In any case, why can't I have a username of @😉

What's Next?

If you build ActivityPub software, give some thought to the billions of people who don't have names which easily fit into ASCII.

If your software can see @你好@i18n.viii.fi and its posts, please let me know.

@mcc @Hearth @xgranade I'm guessing Q and R are disallowed to mitigate homoglyph attacks. Maybe Old Hangul too, which presumably contains some homoglyphs with modern Hangul.

Somebody linked me RFC 7565, which linked to RFC7564, and if that's the place to look this appears to be the list of disallowed characters in a Fediverse username, and I'm cracking up because it's *mostly* stuff you'd expect, except the very first category of banned characters, specially, is "pre-1700 Korean characters".

The fediverse is welcome to all. EXCEPT KOREAN TIME TRAVELERS. Did you just wake up from being frozen in ice during the Joseon dynasty? The IETF is targeting you PERSONALLY

I Guess I’m now the first ever Indiekit Instance on the #fediverse

Thanks to Fedify

{
"@context": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"https://w3id.org/security/v1"
],
"type": "Person",
"id": "https://rmendes.net/",
"preferredUsername": "rick",
"name": "Ricardo Mendes",
"url": "https://rmendes.net/",
"inbox": "https://rmendes.net/activitypub/inbox",
"outbox": "https://rmendes.net/activitypub/outbox",
"followers": "…

https://rmendes.net/notes/2026/02/19/8b1d5

@evan @cwebber @kopper @hongminhee Couldn’t we agree to standardize on expanded json-ld? We would not need any json-ld processor, we would not need to fetch or cache any context. There would be no way to shadow properties.

@kopper @evan @cwebber Ah, yes, the https://w3id.org/identity/v1 context... As I recall, I probably used it because I needed some kind of context to handle Linked Data Signatures. It's a bit embarrassing, but Fedify also preloads and uses that context. Personally, I wish https://w3id.org/identity/v1 would redirect to a different URL instead of the now-defunct https://web-payments.org/contexts/identity-v1.jsonld.

Nice that @kagihq Translate is available on iOS now. Using it as my new default.

https://apps.apple.com/se/app/kagi-translate/id6748310237?l=en-GB

@kopper @hongminhee As the person probably most responsible for making sure json-ld stayed in the spec (two reasons: because it was the only extensibility answer we had, and because we were trying hard to retain interoperability with the linked data people, which ultimately did not matter), I agree with you. I do ultimately regret not having a simpler solution than json-ld, especially because it greatly hurt our ability to sign messages, which has considerable effect on the ecosystem.

Mea culpa :\

I do think it's fixable. I'd be interested in joining a conversation about how to fix it.

One of the most interesting areas of exploration in the ActivityPub community right now is the ActivityPub API. Most people who know ActivityPub are familiar with its federation protocol, which lets social networking servers like Mastodon and Pixelfed share data between them. But there is another, closely-related feature in the same specification, called the "social API".

ActivityPub has five normative sections: 3 Objects, 4 Actors, 5 Collections, 6 Client-to-Server Interactions, and 7 Server-to-Server Interactions. 3, 4, and 5 provide a read-only interface to social data that is useful for both the federation protocol and the social API. It lets both clients and servers read information about users on the network, their feeds, and the things they make and share.

Section 6 is focused on the mechanism clients can use to create new activities, and the side-effects of those activities. "Activities" are the most important data structure in ActivityPub (which is why they're featured so prominently in the name!). They represent sentences or statements about things that happen on a social network, like "Christine created the image img123.jpg" or "Evan liked Christine's image img123.jpg" and "Amy shared Christine's image img123.jpg". Creating these statements is how clients can make things happen with ActivityPub.

Section 7 is focused on how and when servers can send these activities across the network to other servers. There are some side-effects that are laid out, but mostly they involve cache management.

So, here's the important point I want to make: the federation protocol which connects ActivityPub servers is defined in sections 3, 4, 5, and 7. The social API is defined in sections 3, 4, 5, and 6. But some people use "server-to-server" or "s2s" as a synonym for the federation protocol, even though "server to server interactions" only covers one section. Similarly, some people use "c2s" or "client-to-server" as a synonym for the social API, even if "client-to-server interactions" is only one section.

I prefer to use "social API" or "ActivityPub API" to refer to the entire part of ActivityPub that lets client apps talk to social servers. Here are some rough reasons why.

• It's what the spec calls it. In the conformance section, we said that 'this specification defines two closely related and interacting protocols: A client to server protocol, or "Social API" [...] A server to server protocol, or "Federation Protocol"'. This was intentional; the names come from the Social Web Working Group charter deliverables. Making a Social API was a key goal of the group. The ActivityPub API satisfies that goal.
• It's a term that all developers and many users are familiar with. People who've used mobile apps or third-party apps know what an API is and what it's for. If you use "c2s", it's not clear to most developers what you're even talking about.
• It's accurate. The social API is a RESTful API that uses JSON, HTTP, and all the fun stuff that app developers are already familiar with.
• It emphasizes what's already available. People often say that Mastodon does not implement the ActivityPub API. But it implements sections 3, 4, and 5 of the specification – it has to, in order to support the federation protocol. That's the entire read-only side of the API. All (almost all?) Fediverse servers support these parts of the spec, too. You can build a pretty OK read-only API client using what's already available from Mastodon and others; see https://acct.swf.pub/ for an example.
• "c2s" doesn't cover the whole API. As I said above, only one section of the doc is called "Client-to-Server Interactions", and it doesn't cover the read-only side of the API.
• "c2s" is insider jargon. c2s isn't a common term for RESTful APIs. It really isn't a common term at all; there are only a few protocol suites, like XMPP, that refer to the "c2s" and "s2s" part.

I think it's fine if others use "c2s" when talking about the API, or especially about section 6 of the ActivityPub spec. It's not going to cause any harm. But the Social Web Community Group task force on implementing the API is called the "ActivityPub API" task force. I think that's a good idea – it emphasizes the API. I intent to use this name and framing for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of the quality of Apple's Private Cloud Compute model…

🫥

Discordはもともとクローズドなので、開かれたコミュニティ志向でやってるプロジェクトで採用するのはどうかって話ではあったかも。

コミュニティをDiscordからMatrixへ段階的に移行しています。メンテナーとコントリビューターはすでにMatrixに移っているため、今後はMatrixのほうが返答が早くなります。Discordはしばらく継続しますが、Matrixがメインの場となりました。

詳細とMatrixルームの一覧はこちら：https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/discussions/573（英文）

저희 커뮤니티를 Discord에서 Matrix로 조금씩 이전하고 있습니다. 메인테이너와 기여자들은 이미 Matrix로 옮긴 상태라, 앞으로는 Matrix 쪽이 응답이 더 빠를 거예요. Discord는 당분간 유지되지만, Matrix가 이제 메인 거점입니다.

자세한 내용과 Matrix 룸 목록은 여기서 확인하세요: https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/discussions/573.

We're gradually moving our community from Discord to Matrix. The maintainers and contributors are already there, so you'll get faster responses on Matrix going forward. Discord will stay up for a while, but Matrix is now our primary home.

For the full details and the list of Matrix rooms, see: https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/discussions/573.

What if Mastodon API Enhancement Proposals so that we won’t have 5+ different ways to change your password on platforms implementing MastoAPI?

@FredPraca 언젠가 韓國(한국)에 꼭 놀러오세요! 😀

@FredPraca 炸醬麵(짜장면)은 韓國式(한국식) 中華料理(중화요리)라서, 韓國(한국) 밖에서는 찾기 어려울 거예요. 😅

산라탕 먹고 싶다

부담없이 예약없이 들어가서 산라탕만 먹고 나올 수 있는 중국집이 있으면 좋겠어

오늘 저녁은 뭘 먹을까?

@jannem That's a fair point, and I think you may be right that a life sentence is harder to argue against on legal or moral grounds than a death sentence would be. The “this punishment is inhumane” argument essentially disappears.

My remaining concern is less about the courts and more about the presidential pardon. In South Korea, the president can unilaterally pardon anyone, and historically this power has been used as a political card rather than a matter of justice. Chun Doo-hwan's pardon wasn't really about whether his sentence was too harsh—it was a political calculation ahead of an election. So I worry that no matter how legally solid the sentence is, a future president could still undo it for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the punishment was proportionate.

That said, I'll admit this is more of a general anxiety about the pardon system than a specific prediction. Maybe the political cost of pardoning someone convicted of insurrection would be too high for any president to seriously consider. I hope so.

Today, 443 days after declaring martial law on December 3, 2024, former President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to life in prison for leading an insurrection. The court found that his martial law decree, the deployment of troops to blockade the National Assembly, and the attempt to detain political figures constituted an act of insurrection against the constitutional order.

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/politics/20260219/ex-president-yoon-suk-yeol-sentenced-to-life-for-leading-insurrection

Many Koreans had hoped for the death penalty—the prosecution had asked for it, and the charge of leading an insurrection only allows three possible sentences: death, life with labor, or life without labor. The court chose life.

I have complicated feelings about this. As someone who believes the death penalty should be abolished, I shouldn't want it imposed on anyone, and in principle I don't—not even on Yoon. But there's a practical dilemma that's hard to ignore. South Korea has a precedent here: Chun Doo-hwan, who led the 1980 military coup and the Gwangju massacre, was sentenced to death at his first trial, reduced to life on appeal, and then pardoned by President Kim Young-sam. He walked free. If the starting point is already life in prison rather than death, it's even easier for an appeals court to reduce the sentence further, and for some future president to pardon him down the road.

So the discomfort isn't really about wanting Yoon to die. It's about the gap between what the sentence says and what actually happens in practice. And that points to a deeper problem: the presidential pardon power. As long as a sitting president can unilaterally pardon anyone—including someone convicted of trying to overthrow the very constitutional order the presidency is supposed to protect—no sentence feels truly final. I'd rather see the death penalty abolished and the pardon power curtailed, so that life in prison actually means life in prison.

법원이 내란 우두머리 혐의로 재판에 넘겨진 윤석열 전 대통령에게 무기징역을 선고했습니다. 김용현 전 장관에게는 징역 30년을 선고했습니다. 2024년 12월3일 비상계엄이 선포된 지 444일 만입니다.

[속보] 법원, 윤석열에 무기징역 선고…“비상계엄으로 ...

@cheeaun Oh, I didn't realize Hollo's quote didn't work on Mastodon… Here's the context: https://hackers.pub/@2chanhaeng/019c6d4e-ca99-7482-8663-8f3cb0d7cb9c.

Fedidevs, any ideas?

Edit: Here's the context: https://hackers.pub/@2chanhaeng/019c6d4e-ca99-7482-8663-8f3cb0d7cb9c.

I want to try making a highly autonomous fediverse bot, just for fun.