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julianI often feel like I am pushing against the "ActivityPub zeitgeist" of sorts, because I am plainly advocating for a thoughtfully designed pull-based mechanism for backfill purposes, but at least among those I've talked to, I'm not hearing any pushback.
Hubzilla and Friendica were one of the first platforms to implement forums (or more accurately "discussion groups" although the only difference is the UI). The biggest challenge at the time was that other platforms didn't (and most still don't) understand groups and group discussions.
When developing, they basically used the following tactics:
1. Implement full discussion group features within Hubzilla, and Friendica, respectively. People who use those platforms get the full experience and full feature set.
2. For platforms that don't have the same features, they implemented what they could. If other platforms don't support certain things, that is not our fault. But we still designed it so that it works with their platforms, mostly using workarounds. They could at least participate, even if they didn't get the full experience.
I think we need to take the same approach. We design it so that thread-based platforms (forums, discussion groups, Facebook-style social media, etc.) all can interact with a full set of features. For social media platforms that don't support threaded conversations, we just do "best effort" accepting the fact that their users will have a degraded experience because their software doesn't support the same features.
So, I would recommend that we create some method of backfilling a thread from the authoritative source (using a pull mechanism), and we advertise that this functionality is available via webfinger and as part of the meta data of the posts themselves. Platforms that don't know what that is will ignore it. Platforms that know what that is will use it.
ActivityPub seems to be a push only protocol, so we may need to make our own mini-pull protocol for this purpose. You can look at the Zot protocol that is part of Hubzilla as an example. I think the Nomad protocol that is part of Streams also does the same thing. Not sure about Friendica. But there is working code that already pulls the entire thread.