How do we handle Groups (Reconciling FEP-400e and FEP-1b12)?

[trwnh]

@grishka

My main idea with FEP-400e was to avoid posting group posts to one’s own profile at all costs.

You can’t prevent this, because there’s no such thing as an explicit “profile” that you add posts into. I don’t really understand why Smithereen and Mastodon are so strongly concerned with this point that it leads to some frankly very strange decisions. There are two “correct” paths forward:

• Explicit manage your “profile” stream as a Collection
• Use something like audience to hint which “streams” the activity should be displayed in (see Overlapping taxonomies and the audience property - #8 by trwnh and Overlapping taxonomies and the audience property - #11 by trwnh for more details)

Really, my concern is that the use of target is not only spec-incompliant, it’s also not a guarantee of the thing you’re trying to guarantee. If you really want to make sure posts don’t get displayed “at all costs” then why not stop using to/cc for such posts? As far as I can tell, Mastodon at least will ignore the audience property and should discard your “group” post as having no recipients.

@grishka

it’s not just walls — it’s a generic mechanism of creating objects into someone else’s collections, while also relinquishing full control over them. My FEP explicitly says that the collection owner can delete someone else’s objects contained in the collection.

This also strikes me as unnecessary. There’s no need to delete other people’s objects, you can just not include them; they effectively become orphaned references that can be garbage collected (or added back later!)