Prior our last task force meeting, @rimu brought up the need for a common nomenclature for ease of communication between ActivityPub implementors. Rimu also took the initiative to conduct an informal survey to see what terminology was used across fediverse-capable software (and some non-federating software).
Going beyond "toots" vs "posts", it was noted (not surprisingly) that each software has their own name for things.
The most common object type passed around via the ActivityPub protocol (as:Note) could be called a comment, a post, or a reply
A grouping of as:Notes could be a post (!!), a topic, a thread, a conversation, or a discussion
A higher order grouping of those could be a community, a category, a forum, a (sub)tag, a group, or a magazine
The main takeaways were that while there was occasional convergence, it wasn't entirely surprising that there were more names for things than things to name. Secondly, it was fairly clear that putting forth a recommendation to align on nomenclature would be fairly futile.
What were we expecting... naming things is, after all, one of the hard problems in computing.
All joking aside, up with a common terminology — a lingua franca (thanks @AaronNGray!) — definitely has some advantages.
What terms do you think communicate these levels of organization most succinctly? Let us know!
