Another thing I’m interested in (but will probably have to address after the initial implementation) is being able to report group posts to group admins specifically. Indeed, while one can report content to the instance admin, I think that should be a distinct action, as:
- rules for a group may be stricter/more specific than those of the instance hosting it, in which case it does not make sense to report to the instance admins
- someone may want to report a group to the hosting instance without the group admins knowing about it (e.g. group that is abusive, with the group admins’ blessing)
In Mastodon, we currently report content by sending a Flag activity to the reported user’s inbox (because there is no mechanism to represent what actor is responsible for moderating an activity), without any other explicit addressing, and with the offending actors/posts in the object attribute.
For reporting to group admins, I think we can simply deliver a similar activity to the group actor’s inbox, with an explicit to addressing to the group. I don’t think that would cause any ambiguity, but it is something I want discussed before going ahead, to avoid the possibility reports intended for the group admins accidentally going to the instance admins instead.
An update on Mastodon’s implementation of groups
Just to update on Mastodon’s implementation: it’s not final, and may change before (or even after) it gets merged, but the initial Mastodon implementation is now ready for review: Add groups support by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #19059 · mastodon/mastodon · GitHub
The details are described in this PR, but essentially, it would be compatible with Smithereen if not for the PublicGroup (http://joinmastodon.org/ns#PublicGroup) actor type and the fact the group posts must have only the group’s member collections in their to addressing.
Both of those changes are deliberate in order to prevent current Mastodon versions from interpreting groups and group posts in a way that would break the group expectations and make migrations a headache.