Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force

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 (@[email protected]) 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 (@[email protected]) 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.