December 2025 ForumWG Meeting
Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force
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Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 18h00 to 19h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (tomorrow) on 4 December 2025.
Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg
Discussions will continue re:
- Mastodon
contextissues (backfill not possible at the moment) - Context (topic/thread) deletion and moving between audiences (communities/categories)
- Deleting entire tree vs. one post.
with_repliesorRemove(Context)?
- Deleting entire tree vs. one post.
- Draft FEP for the above
- Cross-posting (stalled?)
- Mastodon
Feed RSS
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.
Attendees Julian (@julian@activitypub.space) Ted Thibodeau Jr (he/him) (OpenLinkSw.com) // GitHub:@TallTed // Mastodon:@TallTed Jesse Karmani (jesseplusplus@mastodon.social) Agenda Mastodon context issues (backfill not possible at the moment) Context (topic/thread) deletion and moving between audiences (communities/categories) Draft FEP for the above Deleting entire tree vs. one post. with_replies or Remove(Context)? Cross-posting (stalled?) Mastodon context issues Backfill not possible, context remains null Claire and David are aware, can this be reproduced locally? @jesseplusplus Mastodon keeps track of the conversation, but not what the root-level ID is; Frequency keeps track of the parents. This was new to Mastodon codebase (all internally) Possibly the code shared for this is not working Jesse will take a look (diff b/w Decodon and Mastodon) Ted: in-reply-to tracking is akin to parent tracking Jesse: Not quite; Mastodon now tracks root-level ID (that's the piece that might not be working.) Mastodon reading context? The other (harder) half: FEP f228 Jesse made David aware of the possibility of using f228 to backfill Asked whether this would conflict with existing reply tree crawling — suspect it will not. Expected 6–12 months out (or more) tl;dr — no update available, but none was expected either. Context Relocation and Removal Pre-Draft FEP ActivityPub.Space Discussion Genesis of this FEP from needs of ActivityPub.Space. It bridges Microblogiverse and Threadiverse by importing discussions by hashtag (#activitypub among others) Lots of curation needed as people tend to use the #activitypub hashtag when discussing non-AP things Also non-English content, etc. (ActivityPub.Space is English-focused as we have two mods, Julian and another temporary mod from toot.wales/IFTAS) Pre-draft shared with Rimu (rimu@piefed.social) and Felix (nutomic@lemmy.ml) for their thoughts, discussion (linked above) started last night for some additional input. No opposition to Move(Context) as it is not a functionality that is implemented by anybody at the moment Hooray for greenfield AP dev! Out-of-band discussion Remove(Context) received some pushback from Lemmy. This was expected as both Lemmy and Piefed currently use Delete(Object) Felix is recommending that Delete(Object) can supply with_replies property to explicitly denote that the entire reply tree is to be deleted. Julian is recommending that Remove(Context) be used to explicitly denote that the reply-tree/container itself is removed, context can be resolved to determine which exact object IDs to delete if needed, Remove also tells you which audience/community it was removed from. Rimu OK with either approach. Felix raised objection to the wording that Delete(Post) is shown under "backwards compatibility" — Julian will update to reflect equal priority on both approaches. ForumWG discussion Julian admits that it is likely much much easier for Lemmy to update their handling of Delete vs. creating a new handler for Remove. Julian notes disconnect with current behaviour (Delete(Object)) and new behaviour (same, but with_replies) and the actual effect (removal from the community); you cannot actually delete someone else's content because it does not satisfy same-origin constraint (yes, sometimes, but not always.) Currently at an impasse as to how to proceed, but Julian encourages parties present to contribute to the discussion and review the FEP. Would prefer alignment as opposed to supporting both Remove and Delete(Object) w/ replies given that it is unlikely both will be implemented widely. Action Items [ ] Jesse: investigate null context issue; Mastodon [ ] Julian: Revise and publish FEP f15dRelevant Mentions
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Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 18h00 to 19h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (tomorrow) on 4 December 2025.
Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg
Discussions will continue re:
Mastodon context issues (backfill not possible at the moment) Context (topic/thread) deletion and moving between audiences (communities/categories) Deleting entire tree vs. one post. with_replies or Remove(Context)? Draft FEP for the above Cross-posting (stalled?)
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October 2025 ForumWG Meeting
Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (today) on 2 October 2025.
Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg
Discussions will continue re:
FEP 7888/f228 adoption ongoing FEP drafts Context (topic/thread) deletion and moving between audiences (communities/categories)
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Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.
Jesse Karmani (jesseplusplus@mastodon.social), Ted Thibodeau Jr. (tallted@mastodon.social, and Julian Lam (julian@activitypub.space) in attendance Julian provided an update on adoption of FEP 7888 Both Piefed and Lemmy have adopted 7888, and will begin publishing resolvable context collections in their next release Jesse opened a PR to Mastodon, which received preliminary approval from Gargron@mastodon.social (ed. it was later merged, rolled back, updated, a new PR opened, which was then merged) This PR is the first of two planned pull requests. The first generates the outgoing context (the same as what Lemmy/Piefed have done recently) The seconds handles incoming contexts and backfills Jesse was asked whether it would conflict with existing reply-tree crawling methods, but the two are complementary. She expects additional discussion before the PR is opened. Julian noted that it would be helpful if statistics/analytics were gathered by the Mastodon team to see how conversation contexts and backfill works at scale; admits that existing implementations and testing has been small scale and may not reflect real-world usage. Julian noted that Lemmy's implementation (nutomic@lemmy.ml) does not paginate their resolvable context implementation. All objects are listed in one OrderedCollection Jesse noted that she followed Mastodon's pagination convention for collections. Context inheritance Julian asked for opinions on whether contexts were inherited in existing implementations. Notes that NodeBB inherits parent context, but checks further up the known parent chain for further contexts Julian admits that not everybody can and should do this, is also not sure anymore whether NodeBB actually does this. Julian notes the ideal implementation would be every object referencing their immediate parent, which would lead to the entire collection referring to the same context collection. Jesse: Decodon inherits immediate parent context only Ted: notes that this is a reinvention of inReplyTo Julian and Jesse note that there are marked differences between crawling the reply chain. A short discussion about how netnews and usenet handled reply chains was had. Julian notes that Lemmy will not inherit context. Every object will point back to its own server's context collection. This was a conscious decision by Nutomic as each instance is meant to consider its own representation of remote content as the canonical representation ActivityPub.Space Julian made a short shout-out to a new site called ActivityPub.Space, meant to be a hub for AP development discussions ("A federated space for ActivityPub discussions so that they don’t just get lost in ephemeral replies") A short double-back to NNTP and how they approach "eventual consistency" Ted: “Cloud of NNTP servers are all hosts of articles and replies.” Strictly speaking it’s not a reply tree as replies can be inReplyTo multiple parents
