@dansup Entitled? I think you have that backwards. The top-level posts and any comments you make are your data. If you choose to federate with my instance, and your posts are published publicly, then I have the “right” to read them, think about them, and refer to them. That’s what federation means. I do not have the right to copy them and have no ownership in your data.

The posts I make, whether or not they are replies are my data. And the above applies to my posts too. If one of my posts happens to include in its in-reply-to field the unique identifier assigned to one of your posts, that does not give you ownership of my data. I still own my reply. You still own your post.

So what is a thread? It is just the group of individually owned posts that are linked back to a common post by they in-reply-to fields. How that collection should appear is not defined by ActivityPub. Threads are an ephemeral and emergent property of ActivityPub objects. The word is mentioned just once in the spec (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/).

So, you control all of your posts. I control all of my posts. You can control what you see. I can control what I see. You own the portions of a thread that are your posts. I own the portions of a thread that are my posts. Nobody owns the thread itself because it is not an entity in ActivityPub.

And no, just because people are replying to one of your posts, you do not get any ownership over their reply posts, nor do you have any ownership or control of how other people reply to your public posts.

If you want more control, then mark your post as “Mentioned People Only”, and then you can control who is allowed to reply to your post.