Anyway, I agree with the vast majority that the reply should be to Alice's followers. I think the rule of thumb for replies is that they should address about the same audience as the original post, or optionally a subset of that audience. Expanding the audience confuses readers and violates privacy expectations.
Thanks to everyone who responded or replied, even if I didn't like your answers.
Oh, one thing that is worth noting: a lot of people insisted on Bob's absolute prerogative to reply with any kind of visibility he wants: public, his followers, whatever.
This is technically true, but Alice also has some agency here. Her server maintains a collection of `replies` that can be used to read all the replies. There's also another collection for the full thread.
Her server can omit replies that violate her expectations. This limits Bob's reach somewhat.
Other servers can and should use Alice's `replies` collection to see which replies she has consented to. They can and should obscure or hide altogether replies that aren't in that collection.
Mastodon doesn't do either of these things, by the way. It doesn't let you reply to Alice's followers, and it doesn't use the `replies` collection for showing and hiding replies. It's too bad; these are really valuable features of ActivityPub.
@evan I think this is one of the problems with Mastodon being the go to for people in the fediverse, and is also why I've been looking things up and trying to work out how the good ol concept Google+ had could work well in the fediverse, and also supporting all the features of ActivityPub instead of using its own thing, and I even had the idea that if I can get a service like that off the ground, I'd be happy for a non-biased nonprofit organisation to take over. A name for it I thought of is Fedi+ and if eventually that was to be ran by something like the Social Web Foundation or something, that could really help the fediverse at large.
@evan I like the house analogy for things like this. In theory, we are visiting Alice's house — her post (a digital home) — and her original posting should set the terms for the next set of interactions, be it tea, a post or a comment.
@evan i think you know where i already stand on this, but instead of recursively crawling replies collections it would be better if alice had a collection that alice owned and contained a flat set of whatever alice wanted to be in it.
i think "bob gets to choose" is not inherently problematic insofar as alice never actually established any context. bob's post stands on its own, with any arbitrary audience. if there *was* such a thing as "alice's convo" then it can/should have its own audience.
@evan this does lead to a sort of split horizon where "the conversation" depends on who you ask.
in the absolute sense, the global context, bob's reply can continue to exist outside of alice's context. this is actually quite normal -- what is weird is the assumption that all replies must necessarily be bound together.
if i could set my own metadata, this reply would exist in a separate context than your poll, and you might be cc'd.
@trwnh Yes, I agree that a thread collection and a replies collection are useful.
@evan re: "but you're replying to something that could be private"-- yes, i could be. i could be replying to anything or nothing at all. replying to a cnn article, replying to an overheard statement, replying to the weather, replying to a concept.
one example i think about in this regard is how the Linked Data Notifications spec is technically a response to the Social Web WG charter, because that's what prompted its existence: https://www.w3.org/TR/ldn/
if alice lets you see it, cool! if not...
@evan anyone recognizing "alice's conversation" asks alice what is in that conversation, canonically according to alice.
bob's signal for participating in alice's conversation is referencing alice's conversation as context for bob's post... and addressing the audience of alice's context, and perhaps even choosing not to address his own followers if it's not relevant to them. this works much like a mailing list.
in https://w3id.org/fep/7888 i use `context` and `context.audience` as examples.
@trwnh I don't think the thread is addressable, and I don't think `context` is a good property to use here, but otherwise I agree. Alice should maintain a collection of content objects in the thread.
@evan "the thread should have its own audience" is the main bit i am advocating for here i guess, as opposed to "every individual post has its own audience". with the latter you always get issues like this. with the former you bind context and audience together.
@trwnh every object in ActivityPub has an audience defined by its addressing properties.
@trwnh I don't see why. Just like the `replies`, `shares`, and `likes` collections, the `thread` collection should have the same addressees as the root object.
@evan this only works if you (and everyone else!) think "the root object" is special (and in effect treat it as the context). but others can and will disagree and diverge. if i reply to a cnn article and maintain my own comments section, cnn has no say in that. socially, in the case of private things, it's like "if you know you know" -- refer to a thing by id but only some people have further information about what it meant (at some point in time, etc)
@evan well, that's the problem, again -- you see it as "your" thread, and i can't reply without copy-pasting a link to your post and appending "re:"? then appending "cc: evan"? so i can reply but i can't reply using inReplyTo? and you control all 400 posts downstream of your poll, *including the ones that don't mention you*? it's hard to make sense of that...
@trwnh I mean, at some point, it'd be nice if you start a separate thread.
I talk about branching and grafting in FEP 76ea; I think it's a pretty natural process.
Edited 13d ago