hhmx.de

Föderation · Fr 04.10.2024 20:12:44

The minutes from yesterday's Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting can be found at this Google Docs link


Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.



Of note:


Mastodon and its treatment of non-note items

  • Darius Kazemi (@darius@friend.camp) reports that Hometown already supports improved conversion of non-note items (like as:Article) into statuses, and that this serves as a working proof-of-concept towards getting this merged upstream into Mastodon proper.

  • We discussed briefly the Mastodon PR approval process and how it sometimes drives away contributions

    • Darius emphasized the importance of showing real user support to facilitate the merging of pull requests.




Context Collections and FEP Convergence

  • Julian proposed consolidating various FEPs (7888, 400e, 171b) to publish a unified recommendation.

  • Evan (@evan@cosocial.ca) objected to the use of the "context" property in FEP 7888, advocating for a new vocabulary instead.

  • The discussion included differing views on the utility of the context property and its historical usage.

  • Darius utilized his data observatory (TBD) data set to hopefully prove that context is not a properly currently seeing any usage.


"Convenings" and Collaboration Initiatives:

  • Darius, representing the Applied Social Media Lab, proposed organizing physical meetings to enhance interoperability in the fediverse.

  • He will provide a blog post detailing the ActivityPub Data Observatory and related goals.


ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force

  • A new task force will focus on protocol-level issues within ActivityPub, including proper content warnings and labeling.

  • Meetings are tentatively scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month (starting November), with a call for input on scheduling.


Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 20:31:25

@julian @darius I started a new FEP to define a vocabulary specifically for threads.

codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pul

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 20:33:26

@evan @julian @darius How does the “thread” property differ from the “context” property which basically every implementer is already using and has been doing so for 6+ years?

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 21:45:04

@erincandescent @julian @darius it's covered in the doc, which is free to read!

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 21:47:42

@evan @julian @darius That doesn’t really cover the why other than “context is vaguely defined” (maybe, but its’ been used in this exact way for… 7 years now? And is being used in this way by multiple interoperating implementations)

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 21:48:33

@erincandescent @julian @evan it does mention the @context name collision which is imo a real point of confusion

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 22:10:30

@darius @erincandescent @julian @evan well, the json-ld keyword has an @ in front of it for a reason: w3.org/TR/json-ld11/#syntax-to

id and type got aliased but they're really supposed to be @\id and @\type: github.com/w3c/activitystreams

other point of confusion re: @\context vs context was overruled: github.com/w3c/activitystreams

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 22:12:59

@darius @erincandescent @julian @evan there was probably a time when `context` could've gotten renamed in the same way that `scope` was renamed to `audience`, but we're about 10 years too late on that discussion

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 22:21:37

@trwnh @darius @julian @evan I will be the first to admit that I’m not a massive fan of the “context” property name but given it is baked into likely billions of posts at this point I mostly feel it’s the lesser of two evils. If this were an misuse of the property that was blocking some preferable use (e.g. Mastodon’s abuse of the “summary” property for CWs) then I would agree that it would be worth dealing with the pain, but in this case I feel pretty much any use of the property would be better off picking a more specific name so we may as well grandfather the use of “context” for “conversational context” (which is a valid use, per the definition)

Truthfully the Original Sin here is the inclusion of such vaguely defined terms in the original AS2 specification

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 23:11:22

@trwnh @darius @evan @julian (I have converted these thoughts and a few more into an issue. It’s a bit strange to see discussion for a FEP moved to an issue tracker - for pretty much all of them historically a SocialHub thread has been made, and that has worked quite well)

Föderation EN Sa 05.10.2024 02:03:32

@erincandescent @julian @darius @trwnh it was offered as an option and I vastly prefer being able to resolve question by question rather than a long conversation thread that doesn't ever finish.

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 21:57:48

@erincandescent @julian @darius great. You can definitely use both.

`context` is fine for any kind of grouping of objects, as is noted in AV.

w3.org/TR/activitystreams-voca

If you want to specifically talk about a conversation tree, a more specific property is better.

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 22:21:43

@evan @erincandescent @julian @darius I can leave this as a comment on the PR or the issue tracker, but my position is that "conversation tree" is entirely the wrong way to look at it, because a "conversation" and a "reply tree" are not the same thing. You can fork the conversation, you can reply to something in a different conversation, and you can have your post moved to a different conversation. I could define a property for it, but my intent was to gracefully degrade to using it for grouping

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 22:41:30

@trwnh @erincandescent @julian @darius great, definitely comment.

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 23:06:27

@evan @julian @darius Quick question, and forgive me for my ignorance: how is this different from the proposal for Conversation Containers?

https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/src/branch/main/171b/fep-171b.md

Föderation EN Fr 04.10.2024 23:16:04

@deadsuperhero @julian @darius

1. It defines a new property, `thread`, to identify the conversation thread of an object, instead of the `context` property, which can be used for other things besides threading.
2. It uses an existing type, `OrderedCollection`, for the thread, instead of creating a new type.
3. It defines a `root` property to quickly navigate from a thread collection to the root object.
4. The thread contains objects that point to each other using the `inReplyTo` property.