#social 2019-05-06
2019-05-06 UTC
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# 
t_ama test
# nightpool[m] hi!
# dansup hello
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# rialtate[m] fr33domlover : what did you end up settling on for being able to Follow issues and such? Did you decide to make each an actor or to accept Follows on certain objects owned by an actor?
# rialtate[m] Or both?
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# fr33domlover rialtate[m], I decided that users and projects are actors, and (so far) tickets aren't actors. It's possible for people to follow tickets, by sending the Follow to the ticket's project
# fr33domlover With the ticket's ID as the follow target
# rialtate[m] As the literal `target`?
# rialtate[m] Hmm
# fr33domlover rialtate[m], hmmm haven't made a final decision on that, do you have thoughts?
# fr33domlover looks at Follow
# rialtate[m] I'll have to think about it a little deeper for my usecase
# rialtate[m] I do wonder about servclients that don't know how to make the appropriate object
# fr33domlover rialtate[m], looks like it should be the 'object', not the 'target'
# rialtate[m] Servients?
# fr33domlover In Follow, 'actor' is the follower and 'object' is the thing you want to follow
# rialtate[m] Trying to think of a catchy but instantly understood term :)
# rialtate[m] Yeah that's why I asked
# fr33domlover rialtate[m], btw I noticed that once following of non-actors is possible, there's no obvious way for a generic client to tell which things can be followed. Just wondering about that. Maybe in the long term, we could have some hint (such as a capability URI) that lets clients know that some object can be followed. And if there's any problem with following non-actors, I don't mind switching from
# fr33domlover Follow/Unfollow to simple Add/Remove
# fr33domlover Although it should to be more like hmmm maybe Offer of Add?
# fr33domlover Because after the Add, expect Accept/Reject etc
# rialtate[m] Sub and Follow are synonymous
# rialtate[m] Subscribe
# rialtate[m] It's fine
# rialtate[m] And as for discovery, perhaps something like sending a Reject when it is unsupported
# rialtate[m] Couldn't hurt really
# nightpool[m] another situation someone mentioned to me recently was that Tumblr exposed rss feeds for each tag on a users blog
# nightpool[m] another place where 1) there's a clear and obvious actor but 2) you want to follow some subset of their activity
# nightpool[m] one solution is to just follow the full actor and trust your client to sort it out by keeping track of what you "really" care about
# nightpool[m] one maybe compromise solution between letting people follow fully arbitrary objects and only actors is letting people follow arbitrary Collections
# fr33domlover nightpool[m], rialtate[m] idea: iff an object has a followers collection, then a client can assume that object can be followed (but hmm still not a generic way to know to which actor to send the Follow)
# rialtate[m] Fwiw hubzilla has anonymous follow too -- i.e. you can choose to get a notification on a thread without exposing that wish to the thread owner
# rialtate[m] What is the proper notation for listing the collections an object is in? `context: [ col1, col2 ]`?
# nightpool[m] @rialtate:matrix.org: that seems kind of creepy and not necessarily implementable in an actor-based framework like ActivityPub
# nightpool[m] the anonymous follow thing
# fr33domlover rialtate[m], I don't think there's a common notation, and RDF isPartOf (or whatever it was named) comes to mind
# fr33domlover But for AP hmmmm I guess we could abuse context or something, or tag, but I'm starting to worry
# fr33domlover About how easy it is to use and overuse AP properties
# rialtate[m] nightpool: sure it is. Semantically, if Bob follows Alice and Fatima Likes Alice's object, Bob gets that activity through inbox forwarding. So if that Like were instead a Foobar, and Bob wants his UI to ping him about Foobars on Alice's objects, that can happen all internally. No need to send a separate Follow to Alice about it
# nightpool[m] no, AP is pretty strict about only allowing inbox forwarding to actors that are in the audience of the object
# nightpool[m] this also assumes that any activity you'd want to "anonymously follow" is already followed by another local user
# nightpool[m] and this is all setting aside the inherent creepiness of "anonymously following" something
# rialtate[m] > <@nightpool:cybre.space> no, AP is pretty strict about only allowing inbox forwarding to actors that are in the audience of the object
# rialtate[m] Yes but de facto procedure has been to put an actor's followers in the audience when doing something with their objects
# nightpool[m] why would you want to explicitly prevent the thread owner from knowing you were following their thread?
# nightpool[m] maybe I'm not understanding the usecase
# rialtate[m] How is it creepy to tell your ui and not the whole world what your interests are? The reverse is what's creepy
# rialtate[m] Why would a website owner need to know that I have bookmarked one of their pages? It's basically the same thing but more modern
# fr33domlover I'm not sure anonymous follow presents a problem on the ActivityPub side:
# fr33domlover Either you avoid sending a Follow to the target actor and just catch anything you see that other local actors receive
# fr33domlover Or you send a Follow and trust the target server not to notify the user
# fr33domlover In which case it's a plain regular Follow, the rest happens (or doesn't happen) behind the scenes
# fr33domlover Either way I see it as an edge case; Follow means "tell me when you have news", which conceptually means speaking to that person
# fr33domlover So I think conceptually Follow isn't anonymous, there may be tricks to make it anonymous but they don't change how the Follow activity works
# fr33domlover (Say, sending a Follow over Tor or I2P etc. in a sense gives anonymity)
# rialtate[m] Yes but Following a person/group usually implies everything. So you can always pick and filter and rank things however you want after you receive them
# rialtate[m] The use case where you would need to send a Follow is if you want to follow an issue but not the whole project. But realistically, if you wanted to keep your viewing proclivity metadata private you could just follow the repo and filter out the issue clientside still
# rialtate[m] Other than saving bandwidth and potentially database space (ultrasmall client on mobile or raspberry pi or something) I can't think of any reason you would need separate Follows for the same actor... And nothing currently would support it I don't think
# rialtate[m] S/client/servient
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