:heavy_check_mark: individual objects serve a context property
:heavy_check_mark: that context property is a URL that resolves
One of the concerns raised was related to the OrderedCollection of items served by the context. Specifically, if the items presented in the collection were not in chronological order, NodeBB failed at importing some of the items as the inReplyTo referenced an object that did not exist.
The solution to this was to ensure that the collection items were in chronological order from oldest to newest. Once fixed:
:heavy_check_mark: the context resolved to an OrderedCollection containing objects
:heavy_check_mark: NodeBB was able to pull in the entire conversation
NodeBB used to guard against this by ordering all received items by chronological order, but I realized that while this worked 99%+ of the time, there are some fun (ahem...) individuals who send objects with timestamps way in the future.
Personally I think removing the sorting just to fix one edge case was premature. At the same time, I think specifying that the OrderedCollection be sorted in chronological order should be a requirement.
@julian Are the future posts scheduled posts. Do they have a "scheduled" flag or something similar? Is timezone info included by default? Those are the two situations I can think of where this would occur with "timestamps in the future".
@julian I have a classicpress and a wordpress instance where I could test scheduled posts. It might help to check instance logs. I can test scheduled posts from classicpress with ease.
@julian@pfefferle@jesseplusplus@trwnh +1 for chronological order requirement. Are those implementations public? I'd like to test my context resolver against them too
All top level or mid-level objects should report a resolvable context, resolving to an OrderedCollection (the same one if the objects are in the same conversation) containing URLs to said objects.
@julian@silverpill@pfefferle Right now my fork’s implementation has just a Collection rather than an OrderedCollection, but I’m going to change that to an OrderedCollection based on today’s discussion
>yes, but they serve objects because we're radical implementors who don't do the whole activities thing 😝 sorry in advance.
My server can retrieve both kinds of collections :) I had concerns about diverging / conflicting implementations in the past, but the solution was found...
>We were testing against these URLs from @pfefferle@mastodon.social's personal blog
This context is working 👍
>@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social had a test URL but NodeBB fell over because it encountered an Object in next instead of a URL
I have a problem with this one because the first page doesn't have an id. I can adjust my code but the absence of id is unusual. For example, there is a next page (currently 404), and if we navigate to it, how prev would look like if the first page is anonymous?
>All top level or mid-level objects should report a resolvable context
Do you mean replies made by the context owner specifically? I think remote mid-level replies should not be required to have context (that would prevent non-implementing servers from participating).
Do you mean replies made by the context owner specifically?
Correct, or more specifically, at least for all replies coming from the instance that the context owner belongs to... so other sibling replies by users on that instance should also report that same context.
I think @silverpill@mitra.social is right though, your context.first needs an id. I worked around it but it's better to have it so it can be referenced against by another page's prev.
@mario@hub.somaton.com at least per our working implementation, the context only deals with public objects which should be fetchable by an instance (either anonymously or via signed GET).
@silverpill@mitra.social's 171b does what you suggest, sending the full signed (via proofs) activities, which in that sense is more performant as fewer network requests are required (just the one, really), and more reliable as you don't need to fetch the individual objects. However, requiring object integrity proofs is a burden that seems quite difficult to clear at present.
WordPress, NodeBB, and Mastodon are not built in such a way that activities are saved direct-to-database. The activities are consumed and a local representation is saved, which makes going reverse quite difficult, especially when it comes to content from outside the local instance.
@julian i see… In general i think in distributed systems it makes a lot of sense to keep the source intact while consuming the data you need. Other projects might need to consume a different set of fields and the overhead is minimal…
sorry in advance.