Relaxing treatment of non-notes by Mastodon

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent haha, I don’t think it’s violent! nor do I think it’s completely agreement, either — we probably still disagree about the fundamental nature of an Activity, for example.

To summarize, how I think we should proceed is that we should implement more generic support for text reprs of arbitrary objects, including arbitrary activities. My happy default is that any object with content is a “post”, and beyond that, you MAY choose to support contentless Activity types with side effects.

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap and I agree, but I think this approach if actually implemented really combinatorially explodes the protocol. An implication of this direction of thought is that your like has a likes collection, and that likes collection has it's own likes collection, ad infinitum.

You really can express absolutely everything in ActivityPub/AS2 and it's it's biggest flaw IMO. The combinatorial explosion really paralyses implementers

infinite love ⴳ

@darius @erincandescent It’s all just email subscriptions in my head, lol. Like in Github you can choose to be notified of comments, forks, etc. as you please. If LastFM added support for email notifications any time a friend scrobbled anything, and you subbed to that, well… hey, it’s your inbox, right?

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @hongminhee @julian @michael @mike @pfefferle @renchap @thisismissem if we got to do a clean slate do over, I'd commit to either full unification or separation of objects and activities, and also the "implicit collections" would not be reified as Objects (ideally we'd get structural addressing too: you'd be able to explicitly refer to a users followers - for example - without having to know the URL of the collection)

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @darius I think personally I lean towards a pure firehose model. Send me everything you got and let my clients pull out the data they're interested in

In part because we're unlikely to ever agree on one exact axis of filtering

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap

This is why it should be simplified to “just render the content/summary/name” for blogging-oriented apps. The combinatorial explosion is a consequence of hyperlinks. You can’t do away with it. Side effects should be progressive enhancements.

As a publisher, what you CAN do is decide not to put a `likes` collection on everything. This means that the Like of a Like has no side effects.

Jenniferplusplus

@erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @trwnh @michael @renchap
In that clean slate scenario, i would want to explore moving the information carried by activities into headers.

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @darius I heavily dislike the firehose model and would be terrified if my email inbox submitted to the same philosophy.

Laurens Hof

@erincandescent @darius @trwnh the fediverse in general could benefit from thinner servers and thicker clients, it would make all these interop discussions so much easier

Erin 💽✨

@laurenshof @darius @trwnh ... Things I have been shouting for literally a decade!

Laurens Hof

@erincandescent @darius @trwnh right, yeah, i meant this as a i'm-shouting-with-you-in-agreement-post

infinite love ⴳ

@jenniferplusplus @erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap

We should go back to WebSub… and we should also go back to calling it PubSubHubbub

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @darius I actually think this demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the email model

There are times you want to be able to do endpoint to endpoint but potentially automatic message exchanges, and email doesn't really have a mechanism for doing this

The straightforward example is my client noticing your S/MIME or GPG key is expiring and asking if there's a new one

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh @thisismissem @pfefferle @hongminhee @julian @renchap @mike @michael icon, image can help too.

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @darius i think this could be solved by declaring specific endpoints for these things. no reason it should ever reach my inbox unless it's meant for my attention.

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @darius I guess that's where I think your inbox is your actors inbox but not necessarily "your" inbox

Things like Update and Delete activities aren't really for your attention; they're just for endpoint synchronisation

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @trwnh @michael @renchap In pump.io, we divided the inbox stream between "major" (new content, new shares) which is shown in a home timeline interface and "minor" (everything else) streams which are shown like notifications. Your scrobbles should be notifications and should be silenceable by the recipient.

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @darius if the actor represents me, then it is "my" inbox.

the correct solution imo is to spin up more bespoke actors. i'd really like to build upon the concept of "programmable actors", i.e., actors that are automated to act a certain way with activities they receive in their inbox. for example, a Relay could be defined as a programmable actor that Announces the object of any Create it receives, or Announces any activity it receives, or whatever. and it should be a JSON-LD type

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh @darius you want more actors, I want less actors

This, obviously, means war

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh @erincandescent @darius neat! The https://github.com/evanp/bots-rodeo/ platform is supposed to do just that.