@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.
