Minutes from 3 October 2024 WG Meeting

[julian]

The minutes from yesterday's Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting can be found at this Google Docs link

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

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Of note:

Mastodon and its treatment of non-note items

• Darius Kazemi (@[email protected]) reports that Hometown already supports improved conversion of non-note items (like as:Article) into statuses, and that this serves as a working proof-of-concept towards getting this merged upstream into Mastodon proper.
• We discussed briefly the Mastodon PR approval process and how it sometimes drives away contributions
  • Darius emphasized the importance of showing real user support to facilitate the merging of pull requests.

Context Collections and FEP Convergence

• Julian proposed consolidating various FEPs (7888, 400e, 171b) to publish a unified recommendation.
• Evan (@[email protected]) objected to the use of the "context" property in FEP 7888, advocating for a new vocabulary instead.
• The discussion included differing views on the utility of the context property and its historical usage.
• Darius utilized his data observatory (TBD) data set to hopefully prove that context is not a properly currently seeing any usage.

"Convenings" and Collaboration Initiatives:

• Darius, representing the Applied Social Media Lab, proposed organizing physical meetings to enhance interoperability in the fediverse.
• He will provide a blog post detailing the ActivityPub Data Observatory and related goals.

ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force

• A new task force will focus on protocol-level issues within ActivityPub, including proper content warnings and labeling.
• Meetings are tentatively scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month (starting November), with a call for input on scheduling.

[librenews@mastodon.social]

@julian @darius @evan I've been missing these meetings. When is the next and/or is there a calendar?

[julian]

@[email protected] Indeed! The meetings are listed on the SocialCG calendar, and here is the next meeting as scheduled

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@julian @darius I started a new FEP to define a vocabulary specifically for threads.

FEP 76ea: Conversation Threads

fep - Fediverse Enhancement Proposals

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@evan @julian @darius How does the “thread” property differ from the “context” property which basically every implementer is already using and has been doing so for 6+ years?

[darius@friend.camp]

@erincandescent @julian @evan can you give an example of the "context" property in use?

[julian]

@[email protected] @[email protected] keep in mind we're talking about as:context and not @context

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@darius @julian @evan

curl -H "Accept: application/ld+json" https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/6d40d43e-9929-4bf9-9a9b-725ef3a682cd | jq

{
  ...
  "context": "https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18328",
  "id": "https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/6d40d43e-9929-4bf9-9a9b-725ef3a682cd",
  "inReplyTo": "https://cosocial.ca/users/evan/statuses/113250578296473665",

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian @darius @erincandescent self-referential: https://browser.pub/https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/113250586247164172

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@trwnh (same braincell!)

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@erincandescent side note it is cool that browser.pub handles redirects seamlessly

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@trwnh yeah i couldn’t remember the flag to pass to curl

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@trwnh side note: this subthread is a totally perfect illustation of why being able to “fork” the thread would be useful.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@erincandescent right! it's not about replies at all, you can reply to something in a different thread, so it's wrong to define a "thread" as equivalent to a "reply tree"

[julian]

@[email protected] after we deal with conversational contexts we should probably define forking threads. I've been thinking on that a bit recently.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian @erincandescent likewise. my initial thought was using Move to signal something like "these 6 posts were moved to another thread by a moderator"

[julian]

@[email protected] @[email protected] Right, it gets a little confusing when implementors inherit context from the objects they're replying to (or maybe the root node?), but that's exactly what 7888 tries to codify/demystify.

But Akkoma's use of context seems to be in line with 7888 (in that it's pointing back to the resolvable context provided by NodeBB).

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@trwnh @julian @erincandescent I guess there you'd need to look at Move and make sure the target/actor/objects weren't Actors but where other objects?

[darius@friend.camp]

@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

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@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.