Post deletions and their potential to break threads

ActivityPub Server to Server
4

I ended up doing this:

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "type": "Tombstone",
  "formerType": "Note",
  "url": "http://smithereen.local:8080/posts/114",
  "id": "http://smithereen.local:8080/posts/114",
  "inReplyTo": "http://smithereen.local:8080/posts/113",
  "replies": {
    "id": "http://smithereen.local:8080/posts/114/replies",
    "type": "Collection",
    "first": {
      "next": "http://smithereen.local:8080/posts/114/replies?offset=0&count=50",
      "partOf": "http://smithereen.local:8080/posts/114/replies",
      "type": "CollectionPage",
      "items": []
    }
  }
}

If a post gets deleted, either locally or by a Delete activity, and there are replies to it, I don’t delete the DB row completely but rather null most of it, keeping the fields needed to keep the thread intact.