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.

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.

Matt Terenzio

@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 Prodromou

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

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/406

Erin 💽✨

@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 Kazemi

@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

Erin 💽✨

@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",

infinite love ⴳ

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

Erin 💽✨

@trwnh (same braincell!)

infinite love ⴳ

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

Erin 💽✨

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

Erin 💽✨

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

infinite love ⴳ

@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.

infinite love ⴳ

@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).

Emelia 👸🏻

@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 Kazemi

@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

Erin 💽✨

@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.