Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @trwnh @silverpill a thread is a tree with a root. Every non-root node in the tree has an `inReplyTo` that points to one of the other nodes.

It's represented by a `Collection` in the `context` property of each object. (I don't like this, but it's common so we should just use it).

It's in reverse-chronological order.

If you started at the root node and walked the tree using the `replies` collection, you should visit exactly the same nodes as in the `context` collection.

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @evan @julian @silverpill bear in mind though that my thinking here is very heavily influenced by working with ActivityStreams 1, where Collections were not Objects. I still think that distinction was correct; but there's a lot of stuff that was changed in AS2 unnecessarily that I resent and perhaps I'm still grumpy about it

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh @julian @erincandescent @silverpill you can also get the whole thing! That's the big benefit of having a `Collection` -- you can retrieve it.

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @evan @silverpill I've never really understood why anyone would semantically collapse them. You lose so much expressivity by doing that. In my mind, they're *very* distinct from each other. A thread can have its own title which is separate from the title of the "root post". In fact, I don't think "root post" is even the best way to think about it. You can group posts that aren't replies to each other. Your first post may be a response to something outside of the thread.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan @erincandescent @julian @silverpill I don't think a thread *has* to be a tree -- it's a set. The "reply tree" is a separate structure. Threads can be forked out of other threads.

(I also dislike "reverse chron" and heavily favor "forward chron", but custom sorting of collections is not well-specced rn so that's a future step.)

silverpill

@julian I reported this to you because one user asked me "why I can't discover this NodeBB thread from my instance?". I think this is going to happen quite often across the Fediverse.
Maybe in the future we will figure out how to deal with these collections, but right now this leads to a bad user experience

@trwnh @evan @erincandescent @evan

Jupiter Rowland

@julian @Erin

I'm not a dev, so I don't have the technical details down pat.

But Friendica and everything that came after it, including Hubzilla, handle conversations as something enclosed with exactly one (1) post and otherwise only comments, as opposed to Mastodon's loose chain of posts. Replies are always comments instead of posts, and they're always sent to the thread starter who is the owner of the whole thread, and who then distributes them to all participants.

Right after Friendica, permissions were introduced. These aren't stored with each comment separately and with the post only for the post itself. Rather, they're unified for the whole thread. The thread starter defines who is allowed to see what and who is allowed to do what. As opposed to Mastodon, commenters cannot change the permissions of their comments away from those of the start post.

Last year, (streams) switched to conversations as containers. To the outward, it works the same, but internally, it's different. Again, I'm not a dev. @Mike Macgirvin

️ has made all this. But to my understanding, this is when a thread really became an object of its own.

CC: @infinite love ⴳ @Evan Prodromou @silverpill

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Conversations

infinite love ⴳ

@silverpill @[email protected] @erincandescent @julian @[email protected] I'd prefer impls update to support showing threads/collections, rather than NodeBB being held back. UX will get better as other impls update.

At the very least, browser.pub can do it!

silverpill

@trwnh @evan @erincandescent @julian +1 for forward chron, that way you can start displaying posts without fetching the whole thread

Evan Prodromou

@silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @julian Use the `last` property to start with the oldest page.

Evan Prodromou

@silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @julian Also, I think you're imagining some kind of pre-order traversal sorting. If you want that, it's a lot easier to just walk the `replies` tree.

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @silverpill @evan @julian @evan so, truthfully, I'm ambivalent to whether a thread object exists. But if it does, I feel like it should probably be reified distinctly from the thread collection primarily because I don't think treating collections as objects is a good idea. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my strongly held opinion!

And yeah, then we can give threads a following collection and let people follow them as they wish.

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @[email protected] @trwnh @silverpill WTF

infinite love ⴳ

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian just seems backwards to me, for no real reason. if you wanted reverse chron viewing of a forward chron collection, then it makes sense to fetch `last` and page backwards.

at the very least, `startIndex` as a property of OrderedCollectionPage makes **way** more sense with a forward chron presentation.

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh @silverpill @erincandescent @julian

It's bad for caching to do forward chron, which is why we don't do it anywhere else.

Also, it does not help you build a tree structure; older nodes are not necessarily at the top of the tree.

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @evan @evan @julian @silverpill and to be clear my ambivalence about whether there should be a thread object comes primarily because I don't think this is a point on which we will ever get universal agreement

It's an area where I feel the only real route is the "why not both?" compromise that doesn't really make anyone happy

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @[email protected] @trwnh @silverpill Standards are about making arbitrary decisions in the pursuit of uniformity.

Erin 💽✨

@evan @julian @evan @trwnh @silverpill I agree, but... I don't think this has ever been successful in federated social software development except for when forced through market share

infinite love ⴳ

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian why is it bad for caching? it seems like the opposite to me -- reverse-chron means that pages are constantly updating and are almost never consistent! each new item in the collection pushes everything else behind it, and the last item of the page overflows into becoming the first item of the next page. if you did forward-chron, you could freeze "page 1" as soon as it got full, and move onto "page 2".

also, a viewer can easily tell where they left off.

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh @silverpill @erincandescent @julian oh, yes, that's true, if you do "volatile paging" (last 20 pages).

If you have reified pages (item goes in one page and stays there), once the pages are full, they don't change (except for `Remove` activities).

Don't do volatile paging.

If you use reified pages, an add to a reverse-chron collection will typically have changes to `first` and the Collection itself.