julian

@silverpill@mitra.social said:

NodeBB's FEP-7888 collection doesn't identify itself as a "thread".

That's because I am not aware of a clear way to signal that my collection is a thread.

Lemmy uses as:Page, which is far too generic of an object type to signal as a thread. Mastodon doesn't even have an external concept of a conversation (oStatus conversation notwithstanding)

@trwnh@mastodon.social

re: better handling of non-notes by Mastodon

Toward the end of a day 2 FediForum session, @pfefferle@mastodon.social, @manton@manton.org, and I sidetracked a bit and discussed once again the tendency for implementors to shift away from more suitable ActivityStreams Activities to as:Note.

Specifically, it was the demo/session by @samsethi@podcastindex.social re: TrueFans. Instead of federating out an as:Listen, they send as:Note, and it's a fairly safe bet that this is because the content cannot be richly represented in Mastodon. The same story played out with Mattias and the WordPress plugin, and myself with NodeBB.

Secondly, back in March/April and again in May, @renchap@oisaur.com mentioned that resolving this was of some interest to the Mastodon team:

We will work on improving the display of non-Note content in the next Mastodon version

To be clear, getting Mastodon to suitably process as:Article/as:Listen/as:Offer or any number of other activities is not what the ForumWG wants to accomplish. It's not up to Mastodon to adapt to the variety of content on the fediverse, but rather that its fallback handling needs to improve just enough so that its baseline rendering is acceptable to more implementors and their users.

As concise and actionable as I can make it:

1. Mastodon allows a subset of HTML for as:Note. This subset is good enough, but content in non-notes has all html stripped. Keep consistency here and allow the same subset of HTML.


2. Non-note content is truncated. This is no longer necessary due to the addition of the expand button. The wonderful thing is this standardization of behaviour actually simplifies Mastodon code.


3. Instead of appending the object URL to the status content, promote the "Open Original Page" button out of the overflow menu. It's more than okay to defer to the original site vis-a-vis presentation and allow the user a smooth exit if desired (target="_top" would be okay too if you're worried!)

That's it.

You could even skip the third point, but even with 1 and 2 achieved this would sufficiently raise the baseline behaviour just enough that I would immediately update NodeBB to send as:Article for new topics, and I am certain @pfefferle@mastodon.social would adjust his defaults as well.

Lastly, @renchap@oisaur.com, I'm sure I can speak for everyone at FediForum when I say that it was wonderful to see representatives from Mastodon (that of course includes @andypiper@macaw.social as well) in attendance. It means a lot to me personally that you were there, and sends a signal that Mastodon continues to desire broader inter-compatibility.

FediForum hot take:

@dmitri@social.coop: "the key to a successful ActivityPub C2S implementation is a headless AP server"

NodeBB can technically be run headless (although we have our own API)... one wonders...

Just a call out for help from fedidevs re: ActivityPub. For some reason that I have yet to discern, my mentions are not reaching end users if they're on a Mastodon instance.

The annoying thing is they used to work, but seem to have broken somewhat recently.

(Thanks @trwnh@mastodon.social (who ironically, will not be notified of this mention) for letting me know about the issue.)

I include each mention in the tag property, and it includes type, href, and name:

• type is Mention


• href is the url of the user (not the ID)


• name is the full handle without the @ prefix

{
  ...
  "tag": [
    {
        "type": "Mention",
        "href": "https://crag.social/users/devnull",
        "name": "devnull@crag.social"
    }
  ]
  ...

The post is successfully federated, and when queried, the mention is clickable and goes to the local account page for that user (as opposed to linking out to the remote page like a regular URL).

Alas, the mention does not generate a notification on the receiving end.

Does this seem familiar to anyone else?

Agenda preparation for the June ForumWG meeting can be found at this public link (anyone can make comments for review.)

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 1700 to 1800 UTC. You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 1 August 2024.

We will be discussing...

• ongoing research regarding resolvable conversational contexts (aka topics/threads), including backfill and synchronization. (Julian)


• FEP 1b12 vs 400e, and cross-compatibility with both FEPs in a forum/threaded discussion context (Angus)


• Implementation of Posts/Comments/Likes style feeds (Aaron Gray)

If you'd like to speak or inquire about a certain topic, comment in the agenda or reply here, the floor is open!

Tonight I set aside some time to listen to @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz on @mike@flipboard.social's DotSocial podcast.

A lot a lot a lot of what John says mirrors the very same potential that many ActivityPub devs see as well. There are far too many points in that podcast that made me nod my head in agreement (and wish I was a third guest too!), but there was one that was incredibly timely:

Mike: ... you've been thinking about actually embedding the whole article in the ActivityPub post, which is a mind-blowing thing... it's not a link to something else... the whole article is in the post.

John: Yes, this is something that makes perfect sense but is somehow completely new, which is weird...

Mike: You can have formatted text... images? video?

John: ActivityPub is fairly agnostic, you could in theory shove almost anything into it. The question is what is the client on the other side prepared to receive? Do they have some way to display it?

John: If we get platforms in the ActivityPub network to start innovating with content types, it might cause those things to be adopted and it might drive the standard and what it is possible to display

Emphasis mine.

John, Mike, this is almost word-for-word exactly what the Forum and Threaded Discussions working group has been working towards! The main problem is we need buy-in from implementers to push this forward.

We can do this, we can send richer HTML across the protocol in such a way that all those things you two mentioned — in-line images, embedded videos, tables, etc. — can all show up as intended by the sender.

We've got commitment from (but not limited to) representatives from NodeBB, Discourse, and WordPress, and having Ghost and Flipboard sign on would help push this forward just that much more.

Let's do this, let me get you caught up with the state of the protocol re: the Article object type. Let's chat (but publicly, since I can't receive DMs here on NodeBB).

Is there a requirement that an activity ID be unique?

Reason why I ask is it seems prudent to save a list of encountered activities, and drop those that have been seen before.

However that caused me to run head-first into a NodeBB regression because we ourselves don't actually send unique activity IDs.

For example, a Follow-Undo(Follow)-Follow chain would have the two Follows with the same ID, since we just construct them ad-hoc based on request data.

Easy fix is to throw in a timestamp there, but it got me wondering about whether there were uniqueness expectations at all, or whether I was being overzealous in checking for it.

This is a spin-off discussion from today's ForumWG meeting

During today's ForumWG meeting an interesting side discussion cropped up regarding what constitutes an Actor, and whether other object types could be considered Actor-like.

ActivityStreams defines an Actor as being one of five types:

• Application


• Group


• Organization


• Person


• Service

However, a looser definition of an Actor could simply be "if the resolved object contains an inbox and an outbox".

Such a definition opens up the possibility of having lots of things be followable, perhaps without direct user interaction. This was one possibility outlined by @cpmoser@mastodon.social

@trwnh@mastodon.social also mentioned that Mastodon does not consider an object as being an actor unless it is one of those five types.

@dmitri@social.coop noted that this was a topic brought up at a previous AP issue triage meeting. Could you provide a summary?

Also cc @evan@cosocial.ca for his thoughts.

Agenda preparation for the June ForumWG¹ meeting can be found at this public link (anyone can make comments for review.)

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 1700 to 1800 UTC. You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 6 June 2024.

We will be continuing discussions regarding "Article vs. Note" and "Reconciling FEPs 1b12 and 400e", as well as discussing the usage of as:context among implementors. If you'd like to speak or inquire about a certain topic, comment in the agenda or reply here, the floor is open!

¹ ForumWG is the colloquial shorthand for the full name, which is as follows — *takes deep breath* —Social Web Incubator Community Group Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force.

You know what I just noticed about @mike@flipboard.social's DotSocial podcast? The introductions are always succinct and to-the-point. There's no 30-second "John Smith spent 15 years at X doing Y with Z, and revolutionized foo by barbaz, and is also on the board of Fizzbuzz. He is a leading champion for..." blah-de-blah-blah.

Take @snarfed.org@fed.brid.gy's introduction:

The beauty of an open system is that anyone can build on top of it, and try to make it a better place, in the fediverse, software engineer Ryan Barrett is one such developer. Most recently, Ryan built a bridge to connect Bluesky, which uses the AT Protocol, to Mastodon and other platforms, using the ActivityPub protocol. He wanted to advance the fediverse's promise of interoperability. His work ignited a firestorm, revealing learnings, lessons, and insights discussed today.

I never realized how often meaningless polished intros happens on podcasts, radio shows, TV interviews, etc., because I've just learned to tune it all out.

... or maybe it's because if you're an ActivityPub dev, Ryan needs no introduction