Agenda preparation for the November ForumWG meeting can be found at this public link (anyone can make comments for review.)

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 1700 to 1800 UTC. You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 7 November 2024.

We will be continuing onwards with:

• discussions regarding context resolution. Multiple FEPs touch on the subject and there is an opportunity for potential convergence towards a single (or pair) of FEPs that share enough commonalities to allow for interoperability.
• updates by WG members re: non-as:Note support in Mastodon and the Social CG report draft
• whether a resolvable context collection containing plain objects should also contain activities (like an outbox)

As always — time permitting — if you'd like to speak or inquire about a certain topic, comment in the agenda or reply here, the floor is open!

@julian said in Does context in AP have to be a collection, or can be be like a Flag activity? Say I wanted to Create(Note) about a Flag I'd received, I'd need:

If you queried the context, you'd get an OrderedCollection containing objects that you have access to view, but since in NodeBB only moderators can view flag reports, anybody querying it over ActivityPub would just get an empty collection.

The quote was in reference to whether disparate as:Flag activities could be grouped together under a common context (per 7888).

To be technically correct, it would contain the Flag activities... which reminds me of a discussion @trwnh@mastodon.social and @silverpill@mitra.social had about what a context collection could contain... objects vs. activities.

In this particular case, I suppose the context collection would contain activities, not objects, which would mean we'd need to relax any recommendation that they contain either objects or activities, since it could contain any mixture of both.

Related to the ForumWG topic of resolvable context collections, there are four FEPs that are currently in consideration:

1. FEP-7888: Demystifying the context property
2. FEP-400e: Publicly-appendable ActivityPub collections
3. Draft FEP-171b: Conversation Containers, an evolution of Conversation Containers
4. FEP-76ea: Conversation Threads

@silverpill@mitra.social made a suggestion last month to hopefully reduce the number of moving parts:

• Both FEP-400e and FEP-1b12 implementations: support FEP-7888 (context collection)
• FEP-400e implementations: upgrade to Conversation Containers
• FEP-1b12 implementations: add target property to Announce activity that points to context collection.

This takes FEP 400e out of the running (potentially). But the day after that last meeting, @evan@cosocial.ca put together FEP 76ea, and now we're back to three.

My concern is that all three FEPs (7888, 171b, and 76ea) all share these distinct qualities:

• They establish a conversational context for a given object
• They federate out an Add on collection addition. (76ea also sends Remove)
• They contain some concept of a context owner (attributedTo)

They differ on the following qualities:

• 7888/171b use context whereas 76ea uses a new property thr:thread
• 171b specifies a new object type Context
• Collection items:
  • 7888 sends objects in chronological order
  • 171b sends activities in chronological order
  • 76ea sends objects in reverse chronological order

In the lead up to the November WG meeting I'd like to address those differences. All three FEPs are in pre-draft or draft stages, and so I am hoping we can find some common ground and compromise.

Pinging interested parties (who were not already mentioned above) for comment:

@trwnh@socialhub.activitypub.rocks @erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net @mikedev@fediversity.site @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io

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.

Tonight I set aside some time to listen to @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz on @mike@flipboard.social's DotSocial podcast.

A lot a lot a lot of what John says mirrors the very same potential that many ActivityPub devs see as well. There are far too many points in that podcast that made me nod my head in agreement (and wish I was a third guest too!), but there was one that was incredibly timely:

Mike: ... you've been thinking about actually embedding the whole article in the ActivityPub post, which is a mind-blowing thing... it's not a link to something else... the whole article is in the post.
John: Yes, this is something that makes perfect sense but is somehow completely new, which is weird...
Mike: You can have formatted text... images? video?
John: ActivityPub is fairly agnostic, you could in theory shove almost anything into it. The question is what is the client on the other side prepared to receive? Do they have some way to display it?
John: If we get platforms in the ActivityPub network to start innovating with content types, it might cause those things to be adopted and it might drive the standard and what it is possible to display

Emphasis mine.

John, Mike, this is almost word-for-word exactly what the Forum and Threaded Discussions working group has been working towards! The main problem is we need buy-in from implementers to push this forward.

We can do this, we can send richer HTML across the protocol in such a way that all those things you two mentioned — in-line images, embedded videos, tables, etc. — can all show up as intended by the sender.

We've got commitment from (but not limited to) representatives from NodeBB, Discourse, and WordPress, and having Ghost and Flipboard sign on would help push this forward just that much more.

Let's do this, let me get you caught up with the state of the protocol re: the Article object type. Let's chat (but publicly, since I can't receive DMs here on NodeBB).