Dmitri invited participants to the regular SWICG call tomorrow; best place to be informed of upcoming events: SocialCG calendar — "please come by, it is free for everyone to join or listen in"
Angus provided an update to the working group's inclusion under the banner of the Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG), revised name would be the Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force, or "ForumWG" for short.
Julian provided an update on this past month's usage of the fediverse to hold asynchronous discussion, a number of threads have been started on the respective forum categories (both of which federate out) for the working group pertaining to discussions re: agenda items, and have been fairly well received.
Angus and Julian will update the respective handles of their categories to reflect the new working group name
"Lay of the Land" survey reports
Angus: The general spirit of these surveys is 'these are the existing X approaches, the plurality may indicate the need to converge'
Evan re-iterates that it is unlikely any implementors will change their nomenclature to match
Angus asks whether participants find utility in the list
Evan indicates that whatever is decided upon is best used "on-the-wire", Julian agrees and notes that the agreed-upon terminology would be used in the "Definitions" portion of any report written by ForumWG; suggests the list may be best kept as a living reference
Rimu indicates that as the list grows, alternative ways to represent the data may be required
Round of applause for Rimu for taking the initiative to start (and now maintain) the list
Impetus for topic: WordPress sending out as:Note when as:Article would be more suitable
@jupiter_rowland (in topic, paraphrased): Mastodon values microblogging UX and locked down their allowed html to satisfy this constraint, despite Hubzilla's pleas
@mikedev (in topic, paraphrased): Raised issue in 2017 to address issues with inline images being removed. Suggested a compromise: treat Article and Note differently (Note, text only with attachments; Article, full HTML) — Eugen 7 months later closed issue with change to further hamper treatment of Article, by showing only title and link back to source.
@pfefferle (in topic): "You can choose 'Note' if you want to have the best compatibility"
Evan: Whether a note or article is federated, it shouldn't hamper implementation; but as:Page should not be used
Mattias: Choice is given to user as to how WP maps the native Post object to ActivityPub. Historically sent out Article but received a lot of pushback from early adopters. Difficult to reconcile UX with technical limitations
Evan: "An as:Note is a Tweet (we just couldn't call it that), an as:Article is a blog post"
Emelia: "Should software publish different objects based on content length, even if using the same mechanism?"
a: Big picture view — it doesn't seem complicated, but it is, because the line between them is completely arbitrary.
Mattias: We try to autodetect (no headers, content length, etc.), would prefer different content types based on what users write, but the advantage is being able to read content natively on the user's platform of choice
Dmitri: "I think we've got several questions in parallel:
What SHOULD these things (Note & Article) be used for.
What to do about Mastodon who only seems to consume Notes."
a: The reason we're talking about this is because of various differring implementations - for example, in one implementor's mental model, you have a thread with a title and that is separate from the posts contained within; posts that may also have titles of their own. How do we reconcile this?
Julian and Rimu note that @renchap replied in-topic: "... we would like to improve how non-Note objects are processed/displayed in Mastodon."
Julian mentions a compromise put forth by @mikedev where Notes are smaller pieces of content with limited markup and attachments, and Articles are (sometimes) larger pieces with formatting, inline images. Additional survey/spreadsheet to be created, but we could as a group (Mastodon included) converge on a path forward and a report to the SocialCG could be authored. To be continued next month.
1b12 - announcing the activities of their actors, this is what Discourse and NodeBB do, other implementations have taken this approach
@nutomic (paraphrased): "intent of 1b12 is to describe the existing status quo"
400e - Pubicly appendable collections; Picked up by a few other folks, also potentially Mastodon (with their new groups implementation)
How do we treat group actors in forum/threaded implementations?
a: 400e - Groups send Add activities, 1b12 - Groups send Announce activities, otherwise, a Group could even send regular Creates (editor's note: this is a dramatic simplication of the actual post here)
Evan: announce style makes the most sense, understanding that folks use both - suggestion: document both but let consumers know they'll see one or both
Rimu: Implementors can make opinionated decisions on how it should work, and adjust based on the reality of how the major players adopt
Angus will continue collating responses into a spreadsheet re: group implementations
Can a group be multiple different things? e.g. a context/thread has some recipients, a context could be an actor. How forums choose to (or could) represent these relationships via ActivityPub is what is currently being solicited
a: Boils down to "Collections, please use them", but best to start foundationally: Notes in Collections, first.
Due to lack of time discussion of this will take place asynchronously on the fediverse: https://community.nodebb.org/post/99491 (if this does not open in your client, paste it into the search box)
Julian provided one user story: "If you want to share a context to others, one should share the higher-ordered collection, and not what we do today, which is to share the url/object uri for OP."
A suitable implementation could see that and backfill the entire context locally, and redirect the user to the first object.
Angus noted that Discourse already has some support for Collections, will provide details async on forum topic (linked above)
Action Items
@angus and @julian will update the respective handles of their categories to reflect the new working group name
@julian to collate responses to Article vs. Name among implementors, supply recommendation at next meeting.
@angus to collate responses re: Group federation among implementors, continue discussion next meeting
