洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)

Hello! I'm Hong Minhee (洪 民憙), an open source software engineer in my late 30s, living in Seoul, Korea. I'm bisexual and non-binary (they/them), and an enthusiastic advocate of free/open source software and the fediverse.

I work full-time on @fedify, an ActivityPub server framework in TypeScript, funded by @sovtechfund. I'm also the creator of @hollo, a single-user ActivityPub microblog; @botkit, an ActivityPub bot framework; Hackers' Pub, a fediverse platform for software developers; and LogTape, a logging library for JavaScript and TypeScript.

I have a long interest in East Asian languages (CJK) and Unicode. I post mostly in English here, though occasionally in Japanese or in mixed-script Korean (國漢文混用體), a traditional writing style that interleaves Chinese characters with the native Korean alphabet. Wanting to write in that style was actually one of the reasons I joined the fediverse. Feel free to talk to me in English, Korean, Japanese, or even Literary Chinese!

#introduction

はじめまして！ソウル在住の30代後半のオープンソースソフトウェアエンジニア、洪 民憙（ホン・ミンヒ）と申します。バイセクシュアル（bisexual）・ノンバイナリー（non-binary）で、自由・オープンソースソフトウェア（F/OSS）とフェディバース（fediverse）の熱烈な支持者です。

STF（@sovtechfund）の支援を受け、TypeScript用ActivityPubサーバーフレームワーク「@fedify」の開発に専念しています。他にも、おひとり様向けのActivityPubマイクロブログ「@hollo」、ActivityPubボットフレームワーク「@botkit」、ソフトウェア開発者向けフェディバースプラットフォームHackers' Pub、JavaScript・TypeScript用ロギングライブラリLogTapeなどの制作者でもあります。

東アジア言語（いわゆるCJK）とUnicodeにも興味があります。このアカウントでは主に英語で投稿していますが、時々日本語や国漢文混用体（漢字ハングル混じり文）の韓国語でも書いています。実はこの文体で書きたくてフェディバースを始めた、という経緯もあります。日本語、英語、韓国語、漢文でも気軽に話しかけてください！

#自己紹介

安寧(안녕)하세요! 저는 서울에 살고 있는 30代(대) 後半(후반)의 오픈 소스 소프트웨어 엔지니어 洪民憙(홍민희)입니다. 兩性愛者(양성애자)(bisexual)이자 논바이너리(non-binary)이며, 自由(자유)·오픈 소스 소프트웨어(F/OSS)와 聯合宇宙(연합우주)(fediverse)의 熱烈(열렬)한 支持者(지지자)이기도 합니다.

STF(@sovtechfund)의 支援(지원)을 받아 TypeScript用(용) ActivityPub 서버 프레임워크 @fedify 開發(개발)에 專業(전업)으로 任(임)하고 있습니다. 그 外(외)에도 싱글 유저用(용) ActivityPub 마이크로블로그 @hollo, ActivityPub 봇 프레임워크 @botkit, 소프트웨어 開發者(개발자)를 위한 聯合宇宙(연합우주) 플랫폼 Hackers' Pub, JavaScript·TypeScript用(용) 로깅 라이브러리 LogTape 等(등)의 製作者(제작자)이기도 합니다.

東(동)아시아 言語(언어)(이른바 CJK)와 Unicode에도 關心(관심)이 많습니다. 이 計定(계정)에서는 主(주)로 英語(영어)로 포스팅하지만, 때때로 日本語(일본어)나 國漢文混用體(국한문 혼용체) 韓國語(한국어)로도 씁니다. 聯合宇宙(연합우주)에 오게 된 動機(동기) 中(중) 하나가 바로 國漢文混用體(국한문 혼용체)로 글을 쓰고 싶었기 때문이기도 하고요. 韓國語(한국어), 英語(영어), 日本語(일본어), 아니면 漢文(한문)으로도 말을 걸어주세요!

#툿친소 #연친소 #별친소 #자기소개

@julian Yeah, that's why I'm still writing short words myself. My accent won't go anywhere!

@ddelemeny That's a useful framing, and the article is worth reading. The concern about entropy collapse is real—I've seen it happen when native speakers run their own writing through a model and get something smoother but somehow emptier back.

My situation is a bit different, though. The high-entropy original is in Korean. The LLM's job is to carry that across, not to sand it down. Whether it succeeds is a fair question, but the direction of the process matters. I'm not polishing a draft into blandness; I'm trying to get something that exists in one language to exist in another without losing its shape.

Anyway, this has been a genuinely interesting exchange. Thank you for the link.

@phnt Multilingual posting is something I've actually been thinking about and experimenting with already. I'm building a fediverse platform for software developers called Hackers' Pub, where I've been prototyping exactly this kind of feature. My other project, @hollo, is where I post from right now, and I'd like to bring something similar there eventually—the main obstacle is that most fediverse platforms don't properly render multilingual posts even when they receive them—the protocol already supports it via contentMap, but implementations like Mastodon tend to pick one language arbitrarily rather than presenting all of them.

Outside the fediverse, my blog already works this way: each post is written in multiple languages (Korean, Japanese, and English), not as translations filed separately but as the same post published in all three. It's a pattern I find natural given how I actually think and write across languages.

On Google Translate: I stopped using it for Korean–English a long time ago, for the same reasons you'd expect. These days I mostly use Kagi Translate, which is LLM-based and noticeably better for distant language pairs. The gap between that and older MT is stark enough that I think “machine translation” has started to mean two quite different things depending on which generation of tools you're talking about.

@julian I actually just addressed something close to this in a reply up the thread—might be worth a read!

@ddelemeny @silverpill I relate to the immersion argument, and I think it's part of why I avoided machine translation for so long—not out of principle, but because the output wasn't worth learning from. Older MT between Korean and English produced something closer to a word-by-word skeleton than actual language. You couldn't look at it and think: oh, that's how a native speaker would put it. It was more like a scaffold you had to tear down before building anything.

LLMs are different enough that I've had to revise that instinct. The output is often genuinely idiomatic, and when I read a phrase that lands exactly right, there's a recognition that functions a lot like learning—the same feeling as encountering a sentence in a book and thinking: I'll remember that. I do find myself absorbing expressions that way, probably more than I would have expected.

That said, I think your point holds at the edges. For shorter writing I still work without assistance, partly for practical reasons and partly because I notice the difference when I don't. So I suspect I'm arriving at something similar to what you're describing, just from the other direction—using the tool for longer texts while trying to keep the muscle from atrophying entirely on shorter ones.

The dynamic you mention with German and Korean is interesting too. Korean was my concern about English; I imagine the lack of immersion shapes the experience in ways that are hard to compensate for with tools alone.

@julian Thank you for saying this. The ActivityPub development community being Euro-America-centric isn't just a cultural observation. It shapes what gets built, what use cases are considered, and whose needs are treated as edge cases. Language is a big part of that, and I'm glad the point landed.

And yes, apparently the chardet post found its audience. I was not expecting that particular piece to take off, but I'll take it!

@hongminhee@hollo.social I think your post makes me think more critically about the use of LLMs for translation services. It is easy for me to judge from a position of privilege because I am a native English speaker, and I do not realize the access I am given simply because of it.

While reading your post it also made me think about the sacrifices you made to contribute to this community. There are precious few people in the Asia-Pacific region who regularly contribute to AP development, and a large part of that is the language barrier.

If LLM-translation makes the AP development community less euro-america-centric, then I am all for it. Cultural differences we can work through, but language barriers are harder to bypass!

Aside, congratulations for making it onto Hacker News front page

@ddelemeny @silverpill The confidence comes from an asymmetry I suspect many non-native speakers will recognize: I can read English much better than I can write it.

When I write in English on my own, I often know, as I'm writing, that something is off—that the sentence doesn't carry the weight I intended, or that the nuance I wanted is somewhere between the words I've chosen. I just don't always know how to fix it. When I write in Korean first and then work with an LLM, I can read the result and check it against what I meant. Sometimes I'll see a phrase and think: yes, exactly that, I didn't know how to get there myself. That moment of recognition is the verification step.

So I'm not trusting the machine blindly. I'm using my reading ability—which is reasonably good—to audit an output that my writing ability couldn't have produced alone. It's an imperfect process, but it's not as unmoored as handing a text to a system and walking away.

Your point about polyglot authors is well taken. The tool works better when the person using it can actually evaluate what it produces. I'd agree that's a meaningful distinction.

I've been thinking about adding federation health monitoring to #Fedify—not as a separate data store or custom API, but by extending the existing #OpenTelemetry integration. The idea is to expose delivery outcomes, signature verification failures, and per-remote-host error rates as OpenTelemetry metrics alongside the spans Fedify already emits. If you already have a Prometheus or Grafana setup, you'd get federation observability basically for free. Circuit breaker behavior (temporarily skipping a remote server that's been consistently unreachable) could surface as OpenTelemetry events, keeping everything in the same trace context rather than scattered across separate logs.

Does this sound useful to you? I'm curious whether people building on Fedify—or running federated servers in general—would actually reach for this, and what kinds of things you'd most want to observe. Happy to hear any thoughts.

#fedidev #ActivityPub

To be precise, it's not English as a language that I hate, but English as a form of power.

From back when I used to flip through a thick dictionary, taking a minute for each sentence, to now, when I use an LLM to write in English, people don't realize that I'm personally speaking to them in English for their sake. Honestly, I just want to speak in Korean. I hate English.

@silverpill Yes, I used an LLM to help write it. I wrote my thoughts in Korean first, then had it translated. That's kind of the whole point I was making.

I'm not a native English speaker. When I write long-form English on my own, it's slow and the result is often not what I actually meant. Using a tool to bridge that gap doesn't make the thoughts less mine. It makes them more accurately mine, not less. A non-native speaker hiring a copy editor wouldn't get this reaction.

I'll grant you that “the non-slop version of you” stings a little. But I'd rather be legible and called slop than be authentic and misread.

@antoinechambertloir I appreciate the spirit of what you're describing, and the fediverse's approach to translation is genuinely one of its nicer features.

I'd just gently push back on one assumption: that the automatic translation available to both of us is roughly equivalent. French–English and Korean–English are not the same problem for these systems. The linguistic distance is much greater, the training data has historically been thinner, and the results have reflected that gap for a long time. It's only fairly recently that Korean–English machine translation has become reliable enough to carry a real conversation without significant loss.

So when you write in French and I write in Korean, we're not quite sharing the responsibility equally—at least not yet. Though I do think we're getting closer, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about where I stand on all of this.

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/

The norms that open source communities built over decades did not wait for court approval. People chose the GPL when the law offered them no guarantee of its enforcement, because it expressed the values of the communities they wanted to belong to. Those values do not expire when the law changes.

@antoinechambertloir The distinction you're drawing is a useful one, and I largely agree with it. When translation is imposed on you with no alternative, the responsibility for its faithfulness lies with whoever imposed it.

But it makes me ask: which category does my situation fall into?

I'm writing this reply in English. Not because I chose English as my preferred language of expression, but because if I wrote it in Korean, it would either be ignored or filtered through whatever tool my interlocutor happens to have on hand—and any resulting misreading would be treated as my problem. So I write in English, carefully, to preempt that. Is that a voluntary choice? Formally, yes. Practically, it sits much closer to the “imposed” end of your spectrum than it might appear.

The contract model works cleanly when both parties have genuinely equivalent alternatives. When one party's only real options are “use this tool” or “don’t participate,” the contract framing starts to obscure more than it reveals.

@Gargron

@krans That's a real and legitimate grievance, but it's a different argument from the one we were having.

Your employer using LLM translation to cut costs on documentation for a massive Korean customer (while having the resources to do it properly) is a decision made by someone with power, to save money, at the expense of Korean users. That's worth being angry about.

But I'm an individual trying to participate in a public conversation. I can't hire a personal interpreter every time I want to respond to a post. The choice I actually face is: use available tools, or stay silent. Those aren't the same situation, and the same tool can mean very different things depending on who's holding it and why.

If anything, your example reinforces the point. The problem isn't the tool, but it's who gets to decide when it's “good enough.”

@krans The analogy is structurally interesting, but I think it breaks down at a crucial point.

With tax credits, the argument is that the subsidy lets employers off the hook—pressure that would otherwise force wages up gets absorbed by the state instead. The discomfort falls on capital, or at least that's the intent. But when you apply the same logic to language access, the discomfort doesn't fall on the Anglophone center. It falls on the people who were already excluded. The implicit suggestion becomes: non-English speakers should communicate less fluently, so that English speakers are eventually pressured into… what, exactly? Learning Korean? There's no mechanism there.

The deeper problem is that “lowering the bar for communication in English” is not the same thing as accepting English hegemony as permanent. I use these tools to participate in a conversation that would otherwise exclude me. That's not capitulation—it's the same logic as using a wheelchair ramp. You don't refuse the ramp because its existence lets architects keep building stairs.

The structural critique of hegemony is real and I share it. But it shouldn't cash out as advice to the marginalized to make themselves less legible. That's a cost I'm not willing to ask people to pay on behalf of a structural shift that may never come.

@Gargron

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

韓國語(한국어) 母語(모어) 話者(화자)로서 정말 하고 싶은 말이 많아지게 하는 글이네… 只今(지금) 東京(도쿄) 旅行中(여행중)이라 글을 쓸 수가 없는데, 있다가 角(각) 잡고 제대로 反駁(반박) 글을 써 봐야 할 듯.

(Disclosure: Using the name and logo of Encyclia – symbolically, since Encyclia is not a legal entity – I have an active monthly donation to @fedify on OpenCollective. However, I do not believe that this is getting me any preferential treatment, and in my observation the Fedify project treats all contributors and downstream implementers with equal respect.)

Seems as good a day as any to thank @hongminhee and team for the exemplary work on @fedify. Following Fedify's big 2.0 release, my two largest interoperability pain points in @encyclia can be fixed. 🙂

https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/issues/473 means that people using @gotosocial will finally be able to follow @encyclia accounts soon (whenever I finish the upgrade).

https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/issues/472 will let me (and others) handle more account resolution edge cases and reduce failure mode traffic after Fedify 2.1 is out.

this piece by @hongminhee is excellent. #copyleft

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/

それはそれとしてThisIsMissEm大先生がグラントを得られたことは良い話である。同氏が長いこと資金難そうだったのは気掛かりだったし

> When legality is used as a substitute for a value judgment, the question that actually matters gets buried in the footnotes of a law it has already outgrown.

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/

Is legal the same as legitimate: #AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate #licensing #copyright

@monaco_koukoku ご報告ありがとうございます。まさに既知の問題で、先ほどGitHubのイシュー#472としてクローズされました。

問題の本質は、Delete(Actor)を送ってくるアクターはすでに削除済みであるため、署名検証に必要な公開鍵が取得できずFedifyが401 Unauthorizedを返してしまうことにあります。結果としてハンドラーが呼ばれないのは仕様どおりの動作ではあるのですが、Deleteの場合はそれが根本的に困るというわけです。

この問題は次のリリースのFedify 2.1.0で対処されます。InboxListenerSettersにonUnverifiedActivity()というフックが追加され、署名検証に失敗したアクティビティをアプリケーション側でオプトインして処理できるようになります。詳しい使い方はドキュメントをご参照ください。

現在お使いのv1.10.3では残念ながら組み込みの回避策がありません。v2.1.0の正式リリースはまだですが、プレリリースビルドv2.1.0-dev.513+f5543fcaがすでにnpmおよびJSRに上がっていますので、今すぐ試すことも可能です。

海鮮丼を食べにつじ半に来た。

Legal vs. Legitimate, good article by @hongminhee

> Whatever courts eventually decide about AI reimplementation, the question we need to answer first is not a legal one. It is a social one. Do those who take from the commons owe something back? I think they do. That judgment does not require a verdict

"Can the commons expect something back from those who extract value?" is a key question of Social experience design. The answer forms one of 3 core principles: The Mindfulness principle.

No. You can't expect *anything* back. That philosophical insight is crucial to organizing a healthy commons that's able to retain its value and evolve.

Paint any principles and values on a flag but as long as the battle is scattered farmers holding feeble Copyright Law pitchforks against a vast drone army, its no use. Know thy enemy helps too. It's not proprietary code or corporations. It's hypercapitalism: The Rules of Battle.

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47310160

https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#chaordic-organization

I'm thinking of proposing a #fediverse/social web community track at @COSCUP 2026 (Aug 8–9, Taipei)—think FOSDEM's Social Web devroom, but in East Asia. Before I submit the CFP, I'd love to get a sense of what to call it. What do you think?

(Boosts appreciated!)

#ActivityPub #SocialWeb #fedidev #COSCUP