Minutes from 4 September 2025 WG Meeting
Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force
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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
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@trwnh@mastodon.social sure here are the minutes!
I was the only member in attendance 😁 The meeting was adjourned with zero action items
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@julian sorry for oversleeping today -- any minutes?
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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 (today) on 5 February 2026.
Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg
There is no set agenda for this month's meeting.
@julian will discuss a new FEP-f15d: Context Relocation and Removal and integration efforts with the Lemmy and Piefed folk. Updates re: FEP-4f05: Soft Deletion and WordPress and Mastodon's efforts to implement
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@silverpill@mitra.social said in Minutes from 4 December 2025 WG Meeting:
> It's not possible to sign a dynamic object, because some of its properties are constantly changing (items, totalItems and others). This means collections need to be always server-managed. Therefore, clients shouldn't be allowed to directly create, update or delete them.Mmm, signing doesn't guarantee data correctness, it only guarantees that the data presented is correct as of sending, per the sender's point of view.
Just like how signing a Create(Note) only guarantees that the note's data is what it is at the time of the Create, a Move(Context) only guarantees the validity of the context's data at the time of the Move.
That said, this FEP doesn't have you including the entire object in, just the URI, so this is moot........ no?
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Sorry it took so long to respond to this —
Re: assumption of a context belonging to one audience
> Where, in Lemmy? Even if some implementations don't support cross-posting I don't see a reason to block it at the protocol level.This FEP doesn't block cross-posting at the protocol level. Move just explicitly states that a context was Removed from one and Added to another. You could achieve this just fine with Remove followed by Add, but this just reduces it down to a single activity and eliminates any side-effects (e.g. a Remove without corresponding Add might mean content is purged from the db)
So in theory, a context can belong to multiple audiences, and it can be moved from one to another, or removed from one.
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Collections are dynamic objects because they can be paginated and filtered. It's not possible to sign a dynamic object, because some of its properties are constantly changing (items, totalItems and others). This means collections need to be always server-managed. Therefore, clients shouldn't be allowed to directly create, update or delete them.
I think the proposed Move activity is an obfuscated Update because it changes the collection directly.
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>the assumption is already there
Where, in Lemmy? Even if some implementations don't support cross-posting I don't see a reason to block it at the protocol level.
And Update is simpler, that's one activity instead of two (Move and Remove).
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silverpill@mitra.social said in Minutes from 4 December 2025 WG Meeting:
> 2. Treating collections (dynamic views) as static objects that can be moved, deleted etc is not compatible with client-side signing.You mentioned this before, but I am not sure what you are referring to. Do you mind elaborating?
