March 2025 ForumWG Minutes

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

• Julian provided a brief summary of the state of conversational contexts
  • two-pronged approach: top down (feps), bottom up (implementors)
  • IceShrimp.NET (waiting and watching)
    • Already exposes context collections, integration testing pending
  • Mitra
    • Implemented (top-level only) context collections of objects, tested and working
• Julian said 7888 is object-based contexts, 171b is activity-based contexts and notes that activity-based context can be more comprehensive (incl. likes, reactions, updates)
• a (@trwnh@mastodon.social) notes that 7888 is more generic and doesn't specify object-vs-activity; notes there is also a missing link between an object and its Create activity.
• angus (@angusmcleod@mastodon.social) notes Discourse is essentially following 7888 but wants to know how to represent likes if implementors are predominately object-based
• a: use the likes collection, evan (@evan@cosocial.ca) +1'd
• Julian noted that the bottom-up approach (implementors) is mainly focused on backfill, and identifying other implementors.
• Julian also notes that 171b implementors have made some inroads to support backfill from 7888 implementors, both FEPs are cross-compatible and we should strive to have it remain so

Freeform brainstorming session

• Goal: identify and prioritise short-to-medium term goals for the ForumWG
• Medium: Jitsi whiteboard

SVG version

Unfortunately there was no note-taking during the whiteboarding session, but readers are encouraged to ask questions about items identified in the image above (or attached).

• End goal is to be able to point to a set of FEPs if someone new to AP wanted to implement threaded discussions
• Evan suggested that this would be a good report, but also recommended that a W3C explainer be created instead
• Context ownership was identified as a foundational element that is worth exploring/fep creation, as it is what multiple future discussion items would be based upon.

Agenda preparation for the February 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 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 18h00 to 19h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 6 March 2025.

We will be discussing:

• Housekeeping
  • Daylight savings time Monday, ForumWG meetings track Eastern Time
  • EST ⇒ EDT (lose one hour)
• Update — State of Conversational Contexts (Julian)
  • https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18647/the-state-of-conversational-contexts-february-2025
  • IceShrimp.NET (waiting and watching)
    • Already exposes context collections, integration testing pending
  • Mitra
    • Implemented top-level context collections of objects, integration testing pending
• Brainstorm/whiteboarding: Use cases for resolvable contexts
  To decide focus of feps/implementors for the upcoming few months

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!

The full minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting (held on 13 February) can be found at this Google Docs link

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

February 2025 Minutes

• The meeting was deferred a week due to Julian being out of the country, but this time conflicted with the Geosocial TF and perhaps it would be easier to just skip the month instead.
• Julian attempted developer outreach in the weeks leading up to FOSDEM (and at FOSDEM), specifically relating to FEP 7888 and resolvable contexts.
  • Much of the feedback revolved around the perceived complexity of the FEP
  • A separate attempt to focus more on outcomes (e.g. conversational backfill via 7888) led to more positive feedback
• This led to the desire to modify FEP 7888 away from being a (perceived) monolithic FEP into a general high-level introduction to utilising context to represent threaded discussions
  • 7888 would branch out into "child FEPs" that deal with more focused, technical aspects that implementors could pick and choose from.
• In addition to simpifying FEP 7888, the two next candidates for child FEPs would be:
  1. Followable objects (FEP-efda) which would lead to the ability for software to "subscribe" to topics for updates
  2. Conversational Contexts & Backfill (FEP TBD) which is self-explanatory
• A whiteboarding session to determine user stories and long-term FEP prioritiy planning was deferred to March 2025.
• A "resolvable contexts" office hours is planned for 17th February 2025 at 10h00 Eastern Standard Time

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

Monthly meetings normally 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 13 February 2025 due to my being out of the country last week.

We will be discussing:

• Long-form text and resolvable context updates from FOSDEM
• Concerns regarding developer accessibility of FEP 7888
• Live brainstorm/whiteboarding session re: long-term focus of threaded conversation FEPs

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!

Hello all,

Just a quick note that the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force meeting is delayed one week as I am out of the country currently, returning Monday.

There will not be a ForumWG meeting today due to the holidays being a rather slow period for development.

We'll be back in February for a post-FOSDEM meetup!

Agenda preparation for the December 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 5 December 2024.

We will be continuing onwards with:

• FEP convergence (re: conversational contexts) and a proposal re: baseline usage of as:context as a grouping mechanism
• updates by WG members re: non-as:Note support in Mastodon

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!

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.

Agenda preparation for the October 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 3 October 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.

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!

Hi all,

This is just a notification that there will be no ForumWG meeting this month due to end of summer holidays and personal reasons.

Hope to resume again in October!

@dmitri@social.coop @evan@cosocial.ca can you please update the SocialCG calendar to reflect the canceled event?

Agenda preparation for the June 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 1 August 2024.

We will be discussing...

• ongoing research regarding resolvable conversational contexts (aka topics/threads), including backfill and synchronization. (Julian)
• FEP 1b12 vs 400e, and cross-compatibility with both FEPs in a forum/threaded discussion context (Angus)
• Implementation of Posts/Comments/Likes style feeds (Aaron Gray)

If you'd like to speak or inquire about a certain topic, comment in the agenda or reply here, the floor is open!

tl;dr — conversation backfill and synchronization via resolvable context; potential FEP.

This topic is an extension of an earlier discussion: How do you use context (if at all)?

We came out of May's ForumWG meeting with a sense that pursuing formalisation of the context property was a step in the right direction. I later built out a resolvable context collection as part of this effort.

Currently, if you are given a standalone activitypub object, you might not have any or all of the conversation surrounding it. That's part-and-parcel of the design of ActivityPub — that content is pushed to various federated instances, as opposed to one centralized authority —but is a source of some concern as end-users continually remark on how various instances have different reply sets, and worse yet, even the original site may not have the entire conversation.

I can hear @evan@cosocial.ca now:

"ActivityPub is a push and pull-based API!!" — Evan Prodromou

Agreed! Although, while you can pull public objects via ActivityPub, you can't pull said objects if you don't know they exist. Here are your options for building/resolving any single object's conversational context:

• You may opt to do nothing (and the object is standalone; not ideal).
• You may traverse up the inReplyTo chain and build out one direct thread of replies (better).
  • N.B. for security, it is best to limit the traversal to an arbitrary maximum
• New — you may query the object's context property, and if resolving to a (Ordered)Collection, build out the entire conversational context — including all conversational sub-trees — in one fell swoop.

New this week is a proof-of-concept implementation of a "context synchronization" mechanic. Using similar mechanics to Mastodon's FEP-8fcf (Followers collection synchronization across servers), I propose servers can compute a digest for a context collection via its object ids, and serve them using the common ETag header. Recipients may opt to calculate their own digest and begin backfill on digest mismatch. Optionally, the If-None-Match header containing that digest can be sent, allowing the origin server to respond with an even simpler 304 Not Modified.

Technical details re: topic synchronization.

Backfill and sync are both still limited availability; only NodeBB supports them currently. However, I'm working with Angus (building out the Discourse AP integration) to expand support, and I'd like to eventually publish an FEP and SocialCG report to make this all pseudo-official.

We intend to discuss our research at this month's ForumWG (August 1st; 1300 EDT), join us and let's see where this goes!

This is just a notification that the fediverse handle for the Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force has been updated to @forum-wg

Depending on your client, this might be represented as a new account that you may need to re-follow.

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).