Minutes from 3 October 2024 WG Meeting

ActivityPub Threadiverse Working Group
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The minutes from yesterday's Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting can be found at this Google Docs link

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

Of note:

Mastodon and its treatment of non-note items

  • Darius Kazemi (@darius@friend.camp) reports that Hometown already supports improved conversion of non-note items (like as:Article) into statuses, and that this serves as a working proof-of-concept towards getting this merged upstream into Mastodon proper.
  • We discussed briefly the Mastodon PR approval process and how it sometimes drives away contributions
    • Darius emphasized the importance of showing real user support to facilitate the merging of pull requests.

Context Collections and FEP Convergence

  • Julian proposed consolidating various FEPs (7888, 400e, 171b) to publish a unified recommendation.
  • Evan (@evan@cosocial.ca) objected to the use of the "context" property in FEP 7888, advocating for a new vocabulary instead.
  • The discussion included differing views on the utility of the context property and its historical usage.
  • Darius utilized his data observatory (TBD) data set to hopefully prove that context is not a properly currently seeing any usage.

"Convenings" and Collaboration Initiatives:

  • Darius, representing the Applied Social Media Lab, proposed organizing physical meetings to enhance interoperability in the fediverse.
  • He will provide a blog post detailing the ActivityPub Data Observatory and related goals.

ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force

  • A new task force will focus on protocol-level issues within ActivityPub, including proper content warnings and labeling.
  • Meetings are tentatively scheduled for the second Tuesday of each month (starting November), with a call for input on scheduling.
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@julian @darius @evan I've been missing these meetings. When is the next and/or is there a calendar?

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@librenews@mastodon.social Indeed! The meetings are listed on the SocialCG calendar, and here is the next meeting as scheduled

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@julian @darius I started a new FEP to define a vocabulary specifically for threads.

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/406

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@julian @darius I started a new FEP to define a vocabulary specifically for threads.

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/406

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@evan @julian @darius How does the “thread” property differ from the “context” property which basically every implementer is already using and has been doing so for 6+ years?

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@erincandescent @julian @evan can you give an example of the "context" property in use?

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@darius@friend.camp @erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net keep in mind we're talking about as:context and not @context

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@darius @julian @evan 

curl -H "Accept: application/ld+json" https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/6d40d43e-9929-4bf9-9a9b-725ef3a682cd | jq

{
  ...
  "context": "https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18328",
  "id": "https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/6d40d43e-9929-4bf9-9a9b-725ef3a682cd",
  "inReplyTo": "https://cosocial.ca/users/evan/statuses/113250578296473665",
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@julian @darius @erincandescent self-referential: https://browser.pub/https://mastodon.social/@erincandescent@erincandescent.net/113250586247164172

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@julian @darius @erincandescent self-referential: https://browser.pub/https://mastodon.social/@erincandescent@erincandescent.net/113250586247164172

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@trwnh (same braincell!)

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@erincandescent side note it is cool that browser.pub handles redirects seamlessly

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@erincandescent side note it is cool that browser.pub handles redirects seamlessly

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@trwnh yeah i couldn’t remember the flag to pass to curl

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@trwnh side note: this subthread is a totally perfect illustation of why being able to “fork” the thread would be useful.

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@erincandescent right! it's not about replies at all, you can reply to something in a different thread, so it's wrong to define a "thread" as equivalent to a "reply tree"

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@erincandescent right! it's not about replies at all, you can reply to something in a different thread, so it's wrong to define a "thread" as equivalent to a "reply tree"

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@erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net after we deal with conversational contexts we should probably define forking threads. I've been thinking on that a bit recently.

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@julian @erincandescent likewise. my initial thought was using Move to signal something like "these 6 posts were moved to another thread by a moderator"