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

@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

最近(최근) chardet의 MIT 리라이선싱과 關聯(관련)해서 Redis의 antirez와 Flask의 Armin Ronacher(一名(일명) mitsuhiko)가 이를 擁護(옹호)하는 글을 썼는데, 그에 對(대)한 나름대로의 反論(반론)을 써 봤습니다: 〈合法(합법)이면 公正(공정)한가: AI 再具顯(재구현)과 카피레프트의 侵蝕(침식)〉(한글).

chardetのMITへの再ライセンスをめぐって、RedisのantirezとFlaskのArmin Ronacher（通称 mitsuhiko）がそれを擁護する文章を書いていたので、自分なりの反論を書いてみました。

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

Ghostty 1.3 is now out! Scrollback search, native scrollbars, click-to-move cursor, rich clipboard copy, AppleScript, split drag/drop, Unicode 17 and international text improvements, massive performance improvements, and hundreds more changes. https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-3-0