Minutes from 3 October 2024 WG Meeting

Darius Kazemi

@erincandescent @trwnh so by my reckoning, Mastodon and Misskey don't use context, akkoma does... ugh, I need to add more sources to my observatory

Erin 💽✨

@darius @evan @julian side note: Akkoma also emits a “conversation” property containing the same URL, which is JSON-LD mapped tohttp://ostatus.org#conversation. This is because Mastodon will pass-through the conversation property to replies, but doesn’t know about context. When Mastodon generates a Conversation tag (e.g. when its absent from the parent post), it stuffs a tag URI like tag:cosocial.ca,2024-10-04:objectId=26829720:objectType=Conversation into it. This is visible in evan’s earlier post

side side note: “conversation” is misdeclared as a “@value” and not “@id” property in Mastodon’s context. Oh well.

Erin 💽✨

@julian @trwnh When Akkoma originates a thread the context it populates it with doesn’t resolve.

However, fixing that is on my plate.

Erin 💽✨

@darius @trwnh and I believe Lemmy & co do? But I honestly haven’t followed them

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @erincandescent if you want your post to be in the same context as the thing you're replying to, then it's inherited from the thing you're replying to.

7888 also describes what could happen if you decide to set your own context, or set *no* context. in fact, this is how you would self-fork a topic.

Erin 💽✨

@julian @trwnh (Well, I guess whether it resolves or not is a matter of semantics. Arguably it resolves… just, it resolves to a 404)

infinite love ⴳ

@thisismissem @julian @erincandescent yeah, honestly the existing use of Move for migrations is really unfortunate because you're saying "i moved myself from myself to another person" which makes no sense. it should have been defined some other way (Migrate activity? intransitive, takes `actor` and `target` but no `object`). Move makes more sense to manipulate collections (and that's the example provided in AS2-Vocab)

Emelia 👸🏻

@trwnh @julian @erincandescent agreed, another FEP?

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @darius Lemmy uses `audience` instead, referring to the Lemmy community, which is a Group actor, and you're expected to look through the `outbox` and reconstruct replies on your own. the only hint you have is that the root of a reply tree is represented by an Announce Create Page.

good luck

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @darius :akko_AAH:

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Arguably, when Lemmy uses audience they mean one level of abstraction higher than we do (the community). Like Mastodon, Lemmy doesn't actively support the concept of a context... I think.

cc @[email protected]

Erin 💽✨

@julian @trwnh @darius yeah I don’t really object to their use of audience to refer to a community here, its basically the same as to: the community or similar

Their non-use of context is… disappointing, but then much of how Lemmy uses AP is disappointing and Weird.

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @julian (For people following along: I did a quote post experiemnt branching off form here that it seems NodeBB dropped on the floor)

infinite love ⴳ

@thisismissem @julian @erincandescent for Migrate, or Move? i think Migrate might not get much traction so idk if it's worth writing it up, and as for Move i think it makes sense for a FEP building off of the work of the forum TF or maybe even their final CG report. (there's a very skeletonized draft of fep-9988 "federated forums" still on my laptop, which was abandoned more or less when the forum TF was launched)

Emelia 👸🏻

@trwnh @julian @erincandescent there is already a Move for migration FEP

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @darius this reminds me i was going to write a FEP for addressing to signal when you should use to/cc/audience based on some archaeology i did https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/overlapping-taxonomies-and-the-audience-property/4229/8

infinite love ⴳ

@thisismissem @julian @erincandescent yeah, and it mostly describes existing practices rather than proposing any particular path forward

in any case i think the whole "migration" flow right now suffers from some poor semantics all around, and is actually one of the reasons we can't have nice things (proper support for alsoKnownAs instead of using it as a glorified rel-me)

so maybe i *will* write up a FEP anyway, even if no one implements it at least it would be recorded as a potential approach

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @thisismissem @julian For all that the current use of as:alsoKnownAs disagrees with its definition… I’m not sure that’s a problem (except for the need to amend the spec)

We have reasonably straightfoward ways to indicate “This is also me” (alsoKnownAs) vs “This is an exact alias for me” (xrd:alias)

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @erincandescent @darius right, so Lemmy basically forces you to start one level higher and then work your way down, on top of all the reply-tree reconstruction you're expected to do from one big outbox haystack

it reminds me of how we should actually try to flesh out the concept of Group actors and maybe alongside it the concept of a Forum (bc they're not the same to me, there are differences that need to be called out)

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @thisismissem well the real problem is it has undefined implicit "real-world" usage in fedi... and then separately the DID WG tried to (re?)define it in DID Core. but there's already stuff out there in DID world that uses alsoKnownAs the way it's defined in DID Core!