Idea for a new Suggest activity

ActivityPub
1

Hey everyone,

It was great to meet many of you at Prague and I’m happy to see this forum keeping our community together! :grinning:

I’m working on an ActivityPub implementation with a group of people in France (under the umbrella of https://virtual-assembly.org) and we came up with the idea of a new Suggest activity.

In social networks, suggestions are an obscure mechanism. No one knows why some relationships are suggested, and why some are not. Yet they are useful to increase network interactions. I believe that, with ActivityPub, we could offer a clearer mechanism by introducing a new Suggest activity type which would look like this:

{
	"type": "Suggest",
	"actor": "...",
	"to": "{actor / followers / public}",
	"activity": {
		"type": "{Follow / Update / ...}",
		...
	}
}

Like all ActivityPub activities, the Suggest activity arrives in the Inbox of an user or of a list of followers. It is also available publicly.
Anyone can respond to a Suggest activity with an Accept or Reject activity. If a suggestion is accepted, the side effect will be that the activity described is generated by the actor.

We could imagine bots which look around accounts and make suggestions. Anyone could read their public suggestions, or they could follow them and get personnalized suggestions. In all cases, the origin of the suggestion would be clearly identified.
We could also imagine human facilitators, whose mission is to dynamize a community by linking together people.

The most common type of suggestions would be for Follow activities, but we could also imagine to use it for other type of activities like Update. This would allow users to suggest an improvement to an object, like fixing a typo. Not very useful for simple Note-based networks, but definitely convenient when the objects created are more complex.

What do you all think ?

2

This sounds like Offer, which already exists (but has not been implemented)

3

Indeed ! Except Offer is for objects, not activities.

4

Activities are Objects too :wink:

5

Yes it would work with the current specs.
But would it make sense to use Offer for activities’ suggestions ?

6

Sure, why not? Offer {Update {Article}} for example makes sense as-is (“here’s a suggested revision”). So would Offer {Add} (“why don’t you add this object to the target collection”) or Offer {Follow {Actor}} (“please follow me”)

1 Like