What would cross-posting between instances look like in ActivityPub?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@kirkmoodey@universeodon.com yes, Mastodon compatibility is lacklustre but that's partly because the architecture of Mastodon doesn't lend itself well to categorical organization. That's not a criticism, merely a difference that we have to consider.

Currently, when a user addresses multiple communities, then the existing software (NodeBB included) uses the first one. How the rest of the addressed communities are handled is what's of interest here.

[octarine_wiggle@mastodon.au]

@julian @rimu @andrew_s @melroy @BentiGorlich @nutomic @angusmcleod say I make a video and post it somewhere I can set comments subject to approval. A forum or link aggregator whose moderation I trust posts a link to my video. I think I would like to approve a whole discussion that I am confident is moderated appropriately, but not all discussions, and also treat my reactions to individual comments as approvals for display at the publication site.

So I think I would want granularity, deciding whether my content is linked or cross posted, and whether I want to treat the remote discussion as a cross post to my comments section. But I would definitely want it to be the same object. In as far as I would have any duplication the cross post would be best thought of as nested under the post object.

[gunchleoc@mastodon.scot]

@julian @kirkmoodey Mastodon is currently working on a spec for their groups implementation. Maybe get everybody together to hash out a common spec, including those who already have a group implementation like Friendica/Hubzilla, Misskey/IceShrimp/Sharkey, Pleroma/Akkoma?

[rimu@piefed.social]

IMO The simplest way would be to garnish a bit of extra data onto the normal FEP 1b12 process.

Create a new post (Create -> Page to the instance that hosts the community, which in turn does Announce -> Create -> Page to followers) and add an extra field to the Page which is the URL of the original post. That will establish the association.

To reject the cross-post, return HTTP 400 (403?) to the POST to the inbox on the initial Create -> Page ? Or send a Reject activity, either way is fine but the 400 seems easiest. Lemmy returns 400 for a lot of things so we have some prior art in that direction.

[jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks]

gunchleoc:

Mastodon is currently working on a spec for their groups implementation.

Any links to this and/or discussion of how it relates to other FEPs?

[ludrol@szmer.info]

Duplicating the object would mean the discussion is split between objects. The ideal implementation would be the same object present in multiple categories/communities. Is there desire for this in the threadiverse?

If the link goes to a controversial news article and it's get posted into pro- and against- community/group the comments will spiral out of control and it won't be a pleasant place.

Maybe it could be implemented as a toggle per group/instance within one fedi software. It shouldn't be in Activity Pub protocol.

[erlend_sh@socialhub.activitypub.rocks]

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19059

[jdp23@socialhub.activitypub.rocks]

THanks ... turns out I knew about that: the implementation for the NLNet grant, but never released. My impression is that it's been on hold since then, and there's so much other discussions of group-releated FEPs that I certainly hope they'll incorporate newer thinking if and when it moves forward.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

I haven't looked into the differences between their implementation and how groups are implemented using 1b12, but what I have discovered is that the 1b12 community is much larger than I gave it credit for.

[projectmoon@forum.agnos.is]

How would this work on the NodeBB side? Multiple categories associated with one topic?