Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force

The full minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting (held on 7 November) can be found at this Google Docs link

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

Of note:

SWICG ForumWG GitHub repo used to keep track of high level discussion items

• Repo url: https://github.com/swicg/forums
• Issue tracker contains details regarding high-level items discussed at monthly meetings (and on the fediverse between meetings)
• Very early draft report of Conversational Contexts in ActivityPub accessible at https://swicg.github.io/forums/ — just headers and an intro so far

Mastodon and its treatment of non-note items

• Darius Kazemi (@[email protected]) of Hometown put together a light fork of Mastodon that could be merged upstream. It utilises the "read more" functionality to display longer-form content and runs the content of non-note objects through the same parsing that regular notes get.
• Emphasizes that it is not an open PR yet, while discussions are ongoing with Renaud and the Mastodon team. "This is 118 lines of code, touches 4 files. Not huge."
• Some edge cases: How do we handle additional media beyond the cap of 4 currently in place by Mastodon?
• Emelia (@[email protected]) also brings up concerns re: text-field length and a sensible maximum across implementations.
• Evan (@[email protected]) brings up the possibility of this PR making it into Mastodon 4.4, Claire (@[email protected]) acknowleges the possibility
• Darius will write up a summarization and demo video for presentation to the Mastodon team

FEP 7888 and 76ea

• There are still outstanding conflicts between FEPs 7888 and 76ea
  • Beyond the main difference (7888 uses as:context, 76ea uses thr:threads under a new namespace), some philosphical differences persist.
  • e.g. whether the 76ea's definition of an explicit "reply tree" is adequate to describe the multitude of shapes that a conversation can take
• a (@[email protected]) and Evan informally pledge to work together to come to a resolution

Voting re: FEP convergence

• A motion was made by Julian to defer a subsequent motion regarding FEP convergence to a later to-be-determined date pending resolution of the 7888/76ea conflict
• Majority abstained, with two ayes. Resolved.

Context collection items: activities or objects?

• Julian: should a resolvable context collection contain activities (create, like, EmojiReact, etc.), or simple objects?
• Evan makes the case that simpler is better (needing to diff. activities may present a complication for implementors)
• a suggests a reframing as a two-way negotiation of what gets declared vs. approved
• This topic was cut short due to timing