Friendship and other non-follow relationships
-
For being a social protocol, I was somewhat surprised to see that there are no FEPs around something as basic as friend relationships or other social relationships (at least, I didn't find any).
Currently, the only relationship that ActivityPub really defines is the Follow relationship, i.e. the asymmetrical relationship where Alice follows Bob, because Alice would like to see all the activities that Bob produce.
The ActivityStreams vocabulary does talk about relationships in a more general manner, but it is quite vague and this (afaik) doesn't seem to have translated to a wide usage of this approach. It even talks about how you could model requests of those relationships, i.e. friend requests, via the Offer activity with a Relationship object.
Are there implementations out there that use the ActivityStreams' (somewhat loose) definition of relationships and relationship requests? I saw Friendica has this page on "Making Friends" and just from the name of Friendica, you'd think they'd have some notion of friends and friend requests. But from that page, I'm not sure how Friendica represents friends or federates those requests. And are there any other implementations out there that have relationships other than followers and requests for those relationships?
Would it make sense to write an FEP describing the approach laid out in the ActivityStreams vocabulary in more detail? I feel that such an FEP should at minimum cover the usual case of friends and friend requests, but ideally should be generic over any kind of relationship you could imagine (or perhaps at least any relationship defined at
https://vocab.org/relationship/).Or would it be more sensible to implement an approach, learn from that and write an FEP later?
-
For being a social protocol, I was somewhat surprised to see that there are no FEPs around something as basic as friend relationships or other social relationships (at least, I didn't find any).
Currently, the only relationship that ActivityPub really defines is the Follow relationship, i.e. the asymmetrical relationship where Alice follows Bob, because Alice would like to see all the activities that Bob produce.
The ActivityStreams vocabulary does talk about relationships in a more general manner, but it is quite vague and this (afaik) doesn't seem to have translated to a wide usage of this approach. It even talks about how you could model requests of those relationships, i.e. friend requests, via the Offer activity with a Relationship object.
Are there implementations out there that use the ActivityStreams' (somewhat loose) definition of relationships and relationship requests? I saw Friendica has this page on "Making Friends" and just from the name of Friendica, you'd think they'd have some notion of friends and friend requests. But from that page, I'm not sure how Friendica represents friends or federates those requests. And are there any other implementations out there that have relationships other than followers and requests for those relationships?
Would it make sense to write an FEP describing the approach laid out in the ActivityStreams vocabulary in more detail? I feel that such an FEP should at minimum cover the usual case of friends and friend requests, but ideally should be generic over any kind of relationship you could imagine (or perhaps at least any relationship defined at
https://vocab.org/relationship/).Or would it be more sensible to implement an approach, learn from that and write an FEP later?
Probably better to try some things out to see what works.
AS2 Relationship is a very underdefined approach and AP being more pubsub oriented went with Follow rather than Offer Relationship. I think Friendica and similar just go for "mutual followers" as a substitute for proper modeling of connections?
-
Probably better to try some things out to see what works.
AS2 Relationship is a very underdefined approach and AP being more pubsub oriented went with Follow rather than Offer Relationship. I think Friendica and similar just go for "mutual followers" as a substitute for proper modeling of connections?
trwnh:I think Friendica and similar just go for “mutual followers” as a substitute for proper modeling of connections?
Yea that seems a bit weird to me, since following is completely separate from being friends, if you ask me. I have friends I would want to follow, but I definitely also have friends that I don't want to follow . "Friends" on social media is often used quite liberally to also contain even distant acquaintances.
Would be great if someone who knows more about Friendica could comment on their approach/thought process .
-
For being a social protocol, I was somewhat surprised to see that there are no FEPs around something as basic as friend relationships or other social relationships (at least, I didn't find any).
Currently, the only relationship that ActivityPub really defines is the Follow relationship, i.e. the asymmetrical relationship where Alice follows Bob, because Alice would like to see all the activities that Bob produce.
The ActivityStreams vocabulary does talk about relationships in a more general manner, but it is quite vague and this (afaik) doesn't seem to have translated to a wide usage of this approach. It even talks about how you could model requests of those relationships, i.e. friend requests, via the Offer activity with a Relationship object.
Are there implementations out there that use the ActivityStreams' (somewhat loose) definition of relationships and relationship requests? I saw Friendica has this page on "Making Friends" and just from the name of Friendica, you'd think they'd have some notion of friends and friend requests. But from that page, I'm not sure how Friendica represents friends or federates those requests. And are there any other implementations out there that have relationships other than followers and requests for those relationships?
Would it make sense to write an FEP describing the approach laid out in the ActivityStreams vocabulary in more detail? I feel that such an FEP should at minimum cover the usual case of friends and friend requests, but ideally should be generic over any kind of relationship you could imagine (or perhaps at least any relationship defined at
https://vocab.org/relationship/).Or would it be more sensible to implement an approach, learn from that and write an FEP later?
To give a little bit of context from another implementation, NodeBB implements a follower system like ActivityPub.
Out of the box we don't have the concept of "friend", but if we think of the usage as that of early Facebook, then a "friend" relationship implies a reciprocated follow... similar to a LinkedIn "connection".
In AP-land, that'd be a follow-accept and then a follow-accept from the other direction. Whether this is completely automated or manual is dependent on the implementation, I suppose.
