FEP-5624: Per-object reply control policies

[Claire]

@macgirvin

A commenter does not have any authority over the conversation. So if you get an approval from Bob to reply to his comment, it still isn’t going to end up as a branch of my conversation (and Bob will never see it) unless you get approval from me.

Yeah, so that’s a clear departure from the current proposal.

@macgirvin

This implies that every level of threading adds another approval requirement. A random commenter can possibly get an approval from Bob, but what about Jennifer and Fred? And if they don’t all approve it, the approval will never get to me and the comment will not appear in my conversation.

The proposal as it stands would only check the approval of the person being immediately replied to. So the scope would potentially widen with replies, but that could indeed be an issue.

The proposal was aiming to support both models without fully specifying them, but it is clear it is not currently adequate.

@trwnh

Basically, there should be some field that unambiguously signals authority over comments. It makes sense to make that be the attributedTo actor, as everywhere else, authority is derived from the author. But I can see the use in having a conversation be mediated by some third-party actor.

A third-party actor being the authority also makes sense for groups.

@trwnh

It would still be nice if there was a way to unify the approval stuff behind some common interface… I’m not sure it’s a great idea to have n different types of approvesX and xApproval properties, but it may be unavoidable in certain cases.

Another thing that is under discussion is quoted posts (twitter’s quote-retweets). I think an approval mechanism would be very important for such a feature, and would also be slightly easier because we don’t have to care that much about a “Facebook” post-and-comments model VS a “Twitter” replies-as-first-class-objects model. I think it’s a good opportunity to see if common approval mechanisms can effectively get abstracted and if splitting the FEP really is a good idea after all.

@macgirvin do your projects handle quote-posts? And if so, do you have an approval mechanism for them, and while we’re at it, do they behave differently for “root posts” and “comments”?