@nutomic@lemmy.ml could you provide some clarification/insight please

Guppe Announces the original post, and the replies to it, but doesn't Announce anything else. For the replies, it also does what PeerTube does and sends out them unsigned, for instances to verify using the LD signature in the activity, or to fetch from the source. If you want to meaningfully vote on something that came from a.gup.pe, you have to send it to the original author, not to a.gup.pe like you would if you were voting from something from Lemmy, because a.gup.pe will just silently drop it.

Lemmy's communities Announce everything, but Mastodon only comprehends Announce as a Boost, so it just rejects the Announce of anything that's not a Page or a Note. There are other platforms though (e.g. Friendica) who will see the Announce of a Like, and go fetch it from it's source (most non-Lemmy platforms don't trust Lemmy-style Announces, because whilst it's against the spec for Announce contents not to be an exact copy of the original activity, there's nothing stopping a rogue community from misrepresenting users or undoing their intentions).

@julian FEP-1b12 only works with activities,
but Lemmy also announces Page objects for (micro)blogs.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/object/443fb143373ebc5a4df190cddcd2da1f

@silverpill@mitra.social ah yes, thanks for reminding me of this.

When I refactored my 1b12 implementation, I actually removed the second Announce(Object), but I think I will add it back.

Lemmy definitely sends Announce/Create/Note to all followers (but not Announce/Note). Maybe Mastodon made a change recently to ignore those, because people used to complain a lot about their timeline being full of comments after following a Lemmy community.

Edit: Nice to see that federation between NodeBB and Lemmy is working now!

Thanks I replied above.

I have been following a Lemmy community from Firefish and I only get original posts, you can see this behaviour here: https://electricrequiem.com/@comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
However Firefish has had problems with following Lemmy communities so this may not be the default behaviour from Mastodon.

Still, I do think that boosting all replies is not ideal, especially for busy forums. If a topic gets say 50 replies, it can really flood your timeline. Also personally I have set up my Firefish account to only show me original posts (and boosts), to have a cleaner and more compact timeline. With a forum account that boosts everything, you can't filter replies, they all end up in your timeline.

So my suggestion was to perhaps create two accounts for following a forum, one than boosts everything and one that boosts only original posts. This way users would get a choice, and if they find that following everything makes their timeline too busy, they can choose to get only original posts, instead of unfollowing the forum completely.

I recently switched the Discourse plugin back to only Announcing the first Create(Note) in a topic (Collection), but not replies, or updates, as announcing everything was causing issues with Mastodon.

When I refactored my 1b12 implementation, I actually removed the second Announce(Object), but I think I will add it back.

I would gently suggest that sending both Announce(Object) and Announce(Create(Object)) to all followers for the same content is not a good solution to the problem. Yes, other implementors can come up with ways to handle that (I just deployed the Discourse solution to this duplication to SoicalHub), but it's hardly ideal.

@angus@socialhub.activitypub.rocks the other side of the coin is that Mastodon simply doesn't get the replies to a conversation, which decreases the utility of following a category, no?

Rock and a hard place.

Ironically this helps my case that Mastodon should implement conversational context and backfill

You're not wrong. I would make a PR to mastodon, but I fear it would languish in review for years. There has to be a better solution to this though.

@julian Say if we were to make a PR to Mastodon to address this issue what is your take on the lightest touch change we could propose?

I have updated NodeBB (develop, so v4.1 whenever it drops) so that it conforms with 1b12 per spec:

• Only activities will be Announce'd
• The plain object will be Announce'd if the activity is of type Create, and it is the top level post

> a PR to Mastodon

@angus@socialhub.activitypub.rocks I would hold off on that in favour of a PR to introduce context serving and consumption (a la 7888). There are still some issues to work through, but I intend to have it upstreamed (via @frequency@frequency.app) once we settle on a semi-final implementation.

I would advise not to outright open a PR to Mastodon, but reach out to us first and discuss what can be done, and what the plan for action should be.

We want to solve this problem of replies, but it has many complex impacts (how do we represent a conversation in Mastodon ? What about backward compat ? What is required on upgrading ?)

A contributor is working on improving reply fetching (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615) and we are making slow progress, but I guess this is orthogonal to those other context-related RFCs.

I am not an ActivityPub expert and not the best person to discuss this, but we can have a call together and see what needs to be done to improve the situation in Mastodon.

Hello @renchap, thanks for following up. I think the way to tackle this is a version of the following:

1. We agree on a normative approach to the use of context. <--- Discourse, NodeBB, Wordpress and others essentially agree on this already, but it would be helpful to clarify and include folks from Mastodon.
2. We develop a generalised implementation agenda. Generalised, but with the needs of different platforms in mind.
3. Individual implementers adapted the generalised implementation agenda to their specific circumstances. However that works with their individual development cycles / practices.

I suggest we start work on 1 and 2 now and discuss them both further in person at the next Threadiverse Working Group meeting at the start of March. The group was set up to address these questions.

@devnull @trwnh @pfefferle If you're on board with this, let's seize this rare opportunity of having the relevant players involved and finally settle this question so we can move forward. If so, could one of you please start a new topic in #activitypub:threadiverse-wg addressing where we're currently at with 1 as you're both better across this currently than I am.

cc @nutomic @silverpill

We agree on a normative approach to the use of context. <— Discourse, NodeBB, Wordpress and others essentially agree on this already, but it would be helpful to clarify and include folks from Mastodon.

I recently published a FEP that documents different implementations of context collection: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/f228/fep-f228.mdDidn't know that Discourse also implements it. Just tested it - everything works as expected

Doesn't this mean Mastodon users et al will no longer get boost notifications when their posts are reshared into a topic? If you’re never actually resharing the post itself, this prevents cleanly tracking all shares.

Silverpill, thanks for sharing that it works. It's odd because it doesn't work with NodeBB (I woke up this morning missing 4 replies); pulling one should've gotten all of them but I had to pull them one by one (and one of @trwnh@socialhub.activitypub.rocks's still can't make it in).

Sounds like an issue with me, but I'll take a closer look this morning.

@angus@socialhub.activitypub.rocks will do. There has been some movement on this recently and I'd love to keep it going (and keep Mastodon in the loop).

@renchap@oisaur.com, not to worry, I don't plan on making a PR without running it by your team first. I know these things take discussion

I have my own thoughts on Jonny's reply collection backfill, although I will put those thoughts to paper later on.