FEP Convergence (400e, 7888, 171b/Conversation Containers, 76ea)

infinite love ⴳ

@mikedev @julian you shouldn't have to send a Remove if you never Added it.

i also agree that the order should generally be forward-chrono because fetching the context in a linked data browser should render the context in the same way that the HTML view would render it by default. i don't know anyone who reads threads backwards.

in any case i recently submitted https://w3id.org/fep/1985 for explicitly declaring an `orderType` for OrderedCollection

infinite love ⴳ

@mikedev @julian i am also thinking about extended OrderedCollection to specifically represent *sorted* sets and not just *ordered* sets. that fep would define `sortedBy` pointing to a vocab term, as well as `sortType` being either `Ascending` or `Descending`. the only thing that gives me pause is that people can lie about the value of their object's sorting property, for example setting an as:published in the distant past to be pinned to the beginning of the SortedCollection.

infinite love ⴳ

@julian i replied from socialhub but it seems to not have made it across yet... again :x https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-convergence-400e-7888-171b-conversation-containers-76ea/4669/12

a

julian:

They establish a conversational context for a given object

from my understanding, only 7888 and 171b do this. 76ea instead tries to establish a central view of a reply tree, which is not the same as a conversation. there are several cases where replies and context diverge:

replying to something in a different conversation (for example, when conversations get forked or posts get moved to a new conversation)
participating in a conversation without replying
replying without participating in a conversation

also, there is the consideration that context is used for grouping, even if it's not resolvable. so it gracefully falls back to basic grouping behavior in the simplest case. thr:thread doesn't do this.

julian:

They federate out an Add on collection addition. (76ea also sends Remove)

you can send a Remove in all three FEPs, it might just not be called out explicitly. the use of Add/Remove is a courtesy to anyone else following along, so they don't have to fetch the collection manually every single time. (although fetching the collection every single time is inefficient, it is the only way to have a guaranteed consistent state, so there are reasons why you may want to browse the collection "at the authoritative origin", so to speak.)

julian:

171b specifies a new object type Context

i am not strictly opposed to this, but neither do i support it. it might end up being useful to define a type that means "this specifically represents a collection whose items share the same context property" (as i thinkContext is trying to do), but this should not be required.

similarly, we could define a type that means "this specifically represents a collection whose items all have content" (we could call it Conversation or CollectionOfPosts or CollectionOfContentfulObjects or whatever) but this is similarly something that shouldn't be required.

the reason that i think such types shouldn't be required is that not only are they not necessary for the basic mechanisms to work, they also might be misleading or incorrect, because ultimately the contents of any collection are solely decided by whoever owns the collection. i could declare that a collection is a Context and then immediately after this i go and Add a bunch of objects that don't have that context, or any context at all for that matter. this is something that is going to be very relevant in the interim where NodeBB and similar implementations continue to have behavior for traversing reply trees and attaching posts to topics that aren't explicitly declared as context. (not that i think this behavior is necessarily always correct, either -- it's just something that could be done, and is probably useful to do, insofar as other implementations continue to remain unaware of context and its grouping properties. you could just as equally convert posts with inReplyTo but no context into NodeBB Chat Messages instead of NodeBB Topic Posts... but this is an implementation decision.)

julian:

Collection items:
7888 sends objects in chronological order
171b sends activities in chronological order
76ea sends objects in reverse chronological order

7888 is agnostic as to what the exact contents are, aside from them ideally all sharing the same context -- you could have a 7888 collection contain any type in any order. however, with that said: i favor post objects (anything that has content) in forward chronological order, because this is what is most useful to the casual browser. i don't know of any forum software that chooses to present threads in reverse order with the newest posts at the top. they usually do this for topics, but not for posts.

also: these are "defaults", and ultimately we should probably move toward explicitly signaling how collections might be ordered or sorted, as well as providing a mechanism for requesting non-default presentations like "show me this thread in reverse chronological order" (?reversed=true or ?sort=newest or whatever) or "show me posts starting at index 69 and containing 7 items" (?startIndex=69&window=7). to that end, i recently submitted https://w3id.org/fep/1985 for declaring an OrderedCollection to have an explicit orderType of ForwardChronological or ReverseChronological. i also have a pre-draft of a FEP dealing with collections that are not just ordered sets, but specifically sorted sets. this would define SortedCollection as an extension of OrderedCollection, as well as defining a sortedBy property pointing to a vocab term, plus a sortType of either Ascending or Descending. there's https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/pre-fep-evolving-orderedcollection-to-be-more-useful/4608 as the thread exploring this.

regarding the signaling of any given collection or actor following a specific protocol, i think we should define that explicit protocol before defining types. my old draft of FEP-9988 for "Federated Forums" was put on hold for exactly this reason -- there are simply too many protocol considerations that need to happen first. https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/desired-ux-for-forums-and-accompanying-user-stories/4181 or https://community.nodebb.org/post/99491 exists as a thread to collect user stories for forum UX that should directly inform the development of such a protocol.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] I think end of the day it's an implementation detail that is of minimal significance. When I fetch the collection pages I don't trust the order anyway, I reorder them all by date once I have them all anyways.

@[email protected] said that reverse chrono for activities is preferable, and that makes sense if you want to sync up. Just retrieve activities until you reach one you've seen and you're caught up.

julian

@[email protected] said in FEP Convergence (400e, 7888, 171b/Conversation Containers, 76ea):

i don't know of any forum software that chooses to present threads in reverse order with the newest posts at the top.

I'll bite. NodeBB lets you choose how to sort the posts. Chrono, reverse, or by vote count. Q&A forums might elect to use the latter two. But that's neither here nor there, it's a frontend UX thing and shouldn't really have any bearing on an AP S2S implementation detail.

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @mikedev @silverpill i generally agree that seeing newest activities is usually preferable , but you could just as easily traverse as:last/as:prev* and stop when you reach something you've already seen, instead of traversing as:first/as:next* and likewise stopping when you reach something you've already seen. it's never made sense to me to mandate reversed order when it should just be the "recommended default". i think the real issue is that OrderedCollection doesn't imply any real order

a

julian:

that's neither here nor there, it's a frontend UX thing and shouldn't really have any bearing on an AP S2S implementation detail

It has bearing on anyone browsing the linked data, as brought up immediately after:

trwnh:

also: these are “defaults”, and ultimately we should probably move toward explicitly signaling how collections might be ordered or sorted, as well as providing a mechanism for requesting non-default presentations like “show me this thread in reverse chronological order” (?reversed=true or ?sort=newest or whatever) or “show me posts starting at index 69 and containing 7 items” (?startIndex=69&window=7). to that end, i recently submitted fep/fep/1985/fep-1985.md at main - fediverse/fep - Codeberg.org for declaring an OrderedCollection to have an explicit orderType of ForwardChronological or ReverseChronological. i also have a pre-draft of a FEP dealing with collections that are not just ordered sets, but specifically sorted sets. this would define SortedCollection as an extension of OrderedCollection, as well as defining a sortedBy property pointing to a vocab term, plus a sortType of either Ascending or Descending. there’s Pre-FEP: Evolving OrderedCollection to be more useful as the thread exploring this.

Basically, imagine using https://browser.pub (or any other Web browser, really). The representation you serve in response to any GET request should be usable without requiring additional processing. You should be able to follow links normally like any other browser. This is the foundation of linked data.

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @mikedev @[email protected] obviously `context` isn't good enough to identify the thread relationship. Trying to hijack it is contrary to the AS2 spec and common interoperability. One proposal tries to specify it by duck-typing every object; the other by defining a new Collection type. The clearest way to define the relationship is with a property, `thread`, which is specific, clear, and requires no other changes.

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @mikedev I think most developers understand that the reply tree and the conversation are identical. The use cases a describes -- forking, etc. -- can be implemented with `Announce`, perhaps with `content` in the `Announce` activity. I'll add these next week and push a new draft.

Erin 💽✨

@evan @julian @silverpill @trwnh @mikedev "context" isn't good enough to identify any relationship; this is the fundamental problem. It is a property that should never have existed. Today it identifies one relationship: the (loosely defined) thread. I would argue that this is in fact "common interoperability". I would also argue that this fully meets the incredibly vague letter of the ActivityStreams specification.

I have yet to see an alternative use of context that would not be better served by inventing a more specific term. Yes, this applies to use of context for thread too, but we have 7 years of its user to identify the thread as a defacto standard.

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @evan @mikedev @silverpill i don’t think “conversational thread” is a special semantic relationship, and i certainly don’t think it is equal or equivalent to a reply tree! the basis of 7888 is that context should be used for purposeful logical grouping, as it was intended and as it ended up being used in pleroma for years. an unresolvable opaque uri is 7888-compliant. so is a collection with an owner. so is anything else. but IF it is a collection,

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @evan @mikedev @silverpill …then it makes sense that the collection ought to contain items sharing the same contextual grouping. it’s similar to how hashtags are content-addressed grouping, but less purposeful, and no one owns them. the key is that even if you can’t resolve anything out of whatever is in context, you can still use it for grouping by opaque string matching. so there’s clearly defined graceful fallback.

Evan Prodromou

@julian @silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @mikedev I think `context` can be used as a fallback, which provides continuity for most of the legacy implementations.

infinite love ⴳ

@erincandescent @julian @evan @mikedev @silverpill as far as reply trees go, it should be clear that they are not the same as a conversation or context, and inReplyTo exists completely separate and parallel to contextual grouping. the “reply tree” model falls apart the second you reply to multiple things, or reply to something in a different context, or reply and change the context, or set a context but no inReplyTo. i’m not sure why you say Announce has anything to do with it

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @mikedev @silverpill @trwnh there are other uses called out in the AV spec. Someone using those would clash with the use for threads.

I recognize your aversion to change, but "don't change anything" isn't on the menu. We need a way to identify the thread relationship, and a dedicated property is much better than duck-typing objects or making a new collection type.

Evan Prodromou

@erincandescent @julian @mikedev @silverpill @trwnh we have many orders of magnitude more AS2 objects in our future than in our past. I don't think informal practices of existing software should keep us from implementing better formal systems in the future.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan @erincandescent @julian @mikedev @silverpill what is the “thread relationship” and how does it differ from “contextual grouping”?

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh @erincandescent @julian @mikedev @silverpill reply tree

Scott M. Stolz

@julian

reverse chrono for activities is preferable, and that makes sense if you want to sync up. Just retrieve activities until you reach one you've seen and you're caught up.

I wouldn't necessarily trust that. I have seen too many instances of incomplete threads being saved locally, and having to go to the source website to see the whole thread. These missing posts can be a pain, because unless the website supports OpenWebAuth, you can't reply to a comment that was not saved locally on your server.