Topics in the #threadiverse

[email protected]

An "Addressing" FEP would be very helpful. Public and private groups, followers-only and other limited visibility modes, circles and lists - implementers need a unified framework that will guide the development of these features.

[email protected]

In Lemmy each post belongs to single Group which is specified in audience. Having multiple audience values would be valid according to Activitystreams, but there is no way that Lemmy could support it. If I understand right, you are discussing about categories or tags here (where a single post can have more than one). Wouldnt it make more sense to use a different field for that case, such as tag which is used for hashtags?

julian

I think we're in a bit of a fortunate point in time where audience it's not used widely, so there are limited unintentional side effects to using it.

To expand on what I said earlier, while technically there is nothing stopping a context in NodeBB from being a part of multiple audiences, our UI is largely built around them only being a part of one.

To give additional context (ha!), private groups on NodeBB do not have their own space to talk (e.g. Facebook groups), they are literally a grouping of users. If you wanted to have a private space to discuss within group members, you'd create a category and limit it's access to that group. At least for me, it makes it much easier to think of when there are fewer moving parts.

So to that end, if we were to support federated private group discussions, the audience would just be the category (with access restrictions) those objects and contexts are posted to, exactly how 1b12 expects.

julian

The idea of whether or not to put the public collection in as:audience is semi-related. When @[email protected] mentioned it in-thread, I thought it made a lot of sense.

We are already iterating through to and cc for collections, but the public address always seemed like a one-off exception that needed special handling. I dislike special handling.

Jenniferplusplus

@julian On this topic, I whole heartedly vote that everyone be the change they want to see in the (de facto) spec.

`audience` for the Collection(s) of actors to whom the object is expressly available is the only thing that has ever made sense. `to/cc/etc` as the set(s) of actors to whom the object was specifically delivered is also the only thing that ever made sense.

Emelia 👸🏻

@jenniferplusplus @julian how do you decide on notifications? to/cc/bcc or tag -> Mention?

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] typically two ways:

If mentioned in an object
New object encountered in a context that you "watch"

The latter is implementation-specific and is not available on Mastodon due to the lack of context.

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian yeah, I don't think anyone uses to/cc/bcc as a mechanism for notifications — I think everyone's settled on tag->Mention as being the “way”

julian

@[email protected] if coming from outside ActivityPub, the whole concept of addressing is foreign. It's only really used in the context of email... so trying to bolt on newer concepts like visibility and private collections may be challenging.

Jenniferplusplus

@julian @thisismissem It genuinely never occurs to me to use tags as a means of controlling notifications. In fact, the very idea that the sender has more control over notifications than the recipient is mind boggling.

a

julian:

audience it's not used widely, so there are limited unintentional side effects to using it.

julian:

technically there is nothing stopping a context in NodeBB from being a part of multiple audiences, our UI is largely built around them only being a part of one.

julian:

So to that end, if we were to support federated private group discussions, the audience would just be the category (with access restrictions) those objects and contexts are posted to, exactly how 1b12 expects.

I'm not sure those three things add up exactly. Having multiple items in audience sounds like by your own admission as something that would cause at least UI issues for NodeBB, and also probably bigger issues for 1b12 implementations such as Lemmy:

nutomic:

In Lemmy each post belongs to single Group which is specified in audience. Having multiple audience values would be valid according to Activitystreams, but there is no way that Lemmy could support it.

Now, this isn't an argument against having multiple items in audience. But it is something that needs more thought before pursuing it.

For what it's worth, I remain mostly unconvinced that the best application of audience is to list a bunch of taxonomies. I'm also not sure it should be a single Group actor. I could maybe see it being a private collection including all to/cc/bto/bcc; I could also see it being something that you copy over from the context.audience to your own object/activity audience. So I guess the next question is, how do you include or exclude yourself from an audience? If there were an actor for you to Follow or Undo Follow, then that seems straightforward enough... but addressing and audience doesn't really follow that kind of paradigm. So something else is needed.