Yes, that's correct. Deletion of one object will not affect membership of downstream objects in the context collection.

It is not about deleting the objects, it's about if they are in the context collection or not.

If I understand you correctly, we would have before Alice deletes her reply

context[ap-obj] = [ap-obj, reply, repl2]

and

context[ap-obj] = [ap-obj, repl2]

afterwards

Hey Helge.

Per my understanding, when processing a deletion of reply, you would not presume deletion of any or all downstream objects. Only the referenced object is deleted.

Deleting multiple objects at once would require multiple activities, or perhaps a single (and as-yet undefined) "batch" style activity.

Hi @devnull

this regards soft deletion + context collections (as a collection of posts). This topic started at

https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/issues/19

I'm curious what should happen if the context contains three elements ap-obj, reply, and reply2. reply2 is a reply of reply. Now reply is deleted. How many elements does the context then contain?

@silverpill said that for mitra the context would contain 1 element ap-obj.

The scenario as Gherkin:

Background: Given A new user called "Alice" And A new user called "Bob" And An ActivityPub object called "ap-obj"Scenario: Reply to reply with parent reply deleted Given "Alice" replied to "ap-obj" with "Nice post!" as "reply" And "Bob" replied to "reply" with "Good point!" as "reply2" When "Alice" deletes "reply" Then For "Alice", the "context" collection of "ap-obj" contains "?" elements

What would happen if you receive a Delete for an object that you believe to have been soft deleted, but now it shows up as an object instead of a Tombstone? Like, it was undeleted by the time you receive the Delete or something?

Likewise, you receive an Undo(Delete) and when you fetch the referenced object, it returns back a Tombstone instead of the object?

It'd be good to document those cases, because I think the answers are:

If you receive a Delete and the object returns an object, not a 410 / 404 or Tombstone, then you discard the DeleteIf you receive an Undo(Delete) and the object returns a 404, 410 or Tombstone, then you discard the Undo(Delete)

The assumption is that the object is not embedded. If it is, then it stands to reason that the embedded object can be used as is. I'll call it out in that section, thanks.

>Request the object (via its id) from the origin server directly

Couldn't Delete activity itself indicate the type of operation?

For example, if Delete contains embedded Tombstone, then treat it as a soft delete. Otherwise, treat it as a hard delete.

>The Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (ForumWG) has identified a common nomenclature when referring to organized objects in a threaded discussion model.

I find this nomenclature a bit confusing. Commented on the linked issue.

@Claire, in Feb 2002, you created a topic where you mentioned soft deletes. While this isn't strictly related to Undo(Delete), this FEP recommends thinking of a received Delete as an instruction to invalidate the cache, and re-fetch, which would give you a better answer as to how to handle the received Delete or Undo(Delete).

Perhaps this might help.