Minutes from 3 October 2024 WG Meeting

Evan Prodromou

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

Erin 💽✨

@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)

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @darius you can also file an issue here:

fep

fep - Fediverse Enhancement Proposals

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

Darius Kazemi

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

Evan Prodromou

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

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

Activity Vocabulary

(www.w3.org)

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

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @darius finally, if you'd like to talk to me as part of the Forums TF or even as part of the FEP process, where there's a code of conduct, I'd appreciate it if you dial back your derisive tone. It's not OK to talk to me or anybody else working on AP that way.

Erin 💽✨

@evan @julian @darius I don’t really have a horse in this race but we’ll probably never get rid of the existing use of context so I mostly question the advantage of us having to deal with three conversation grouping properties for the indefinite future

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @darius I think the best followup might be commenting on the PR or filing an issue on Codeberg.

infinite love ⴳ

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

id and type got aliased but they're really supposed to be @\id and @\type: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/232

other point of confusion re: @\context vs context was overruled: https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/238

infinite love ⴳ

@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

Erin 💽✨

@evan @julian @darius Would the same line of argumentation not apply for “Why is this a new FEP and not an issue raised against FEP-7888?”

Erin 💽✨

@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

infinite love ⴳ

@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

Evan Prodromou

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

silverpill

@evan @darius @julian Merged: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/76ea/fep-76ea.md

julian

@[email protected] Yes! Exactly... and one could prune a branch (and all of its descendents) off of a reply tree and plant it anew, making it a new conversational context.

Heck, while I'm abusing this analogy, one could even graft a branch onto another context's object!

... but let's not do that lest my brain explode.

Evan Prodromou

@silverpill @darius @julian thank you!

Sean Tilley

@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

Erin 💽✨

@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)

Evan Prodromou

@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.