#social 2019-11-06
2019-11-06 UTC
xmpp-social, sl007, ajordan, tantek, ben_thatmust, ben_thatmustbeme and Grishka joined the channel
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Grishka Hi all! I've been observing requests coming to my ActivityPub server for some days, and I have a somewhat stupid question. It makes sense that you receive replies to posts made by accounts someone on your server follows. Basically, you get the entire reply thread associated with that post, starting with that post itself. But what do you do if someone mentions an account on your server in an unrelated thread? I understand that you receive
# Grishka that reply, but how do you go about getting the context of that?
# Grishka Do you just fetch potentially hundreds of replies before you end up with the top-level post? Do you then go in the opposite direction and fetch the remaining replies in the thread that you don't yet have?
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# trwnh Grishka: you receive whatever other servers send to your inbox. many servers will send to anyone mentioned. if you're interested in context then yes, you will just have to recursively fetch inReplyTo as far back as you're interested in. for prior art, reddit uses a query param like context=3, which loads only 3 posts up and 3 posts down from that point in the tree.
# trwnh there is the `context` property in activitypub that is sort of meant for something similar, but no one really uses it in that way at the moment
# Grishka There's also "conversation" property that at least Mastodon uses, there's a string like "tag:mastodon.social,2019-11-06:objectId=133953240:objectType=Conversation" and it feels like it's an internal conversation id of some sort
# Grishka Internal, since I don't think it's useful for anything but the instance that hosts the top-level post
# trwnh mastodon uses ostatus:conversation which isn't part of the as2 vocab
# trwnh the way that works is it just gets copied blindly into replies, yeah
# Grishka yeah I see
# trwnh there's no way to actually resolve that
# trwnh pleroma uses /contexts/uuid which is a step in the right direction but still unresolvable and doesn't point to an actual object
# trwnh it would be better if `context` in pleroma pointed at the root of the convo imo, but you've still got issues like "what if it was a private status and you can't actually fetch it"
# trwnh but that can happen even when working backwards from inReplyTo, e.g. in cases where you got mentioned in reply to a private post
# trwnh i think the intention was supposed to be that `context` is used for when activities and objects have to refer back to something, like a forum thread
# trwnh or a collection of related activities
# trwnh it is "intentionally vague" to allow multiple usages
# Grishka well, I totally forgot about the private posts
# Grishka how do you complete the thread if there's private post in it somewhere, and you probably get a 403 when fetching it?
# Grishka twitter shows these as "this tweet isn't available", I'd like something like that too, is that at all possible?
# Grishka like if someone mentions your user while replying to a private post
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@joncostello ↩️ Are there plans to add activitypub support? Federated social networks would love to interact with a news focused network I'd bet. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ (twitter.com/_/status/1192219866280775682)
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