Gregory's Server@evan this wouldn’t be the job of the mastodon client, no? it’s the job of the activitypub client / mastodon server. a mastodon client would use the mastodon api for fetching conversations, and may choose to fetch from the root’s origin instead of your local server (although this bypasses your local blocks and mutes)
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10 comments
infinite love ⴳ
@evan i think most mastodon clients don’t want to parse “raw” activitystreams in addition to parsing mastodon api responses. the closest they’ll come to that is requesting the public mastodon api endpoint for the root statuses/:id/context (which is maybe “more complete” but not guaranteed to be “fully complete” either — if some downstream replies drop the root server, then they wont be included) (also the mastodon api limits context to 4096 total entries and gets inefficient long before then)
infinite love ⴳ
@evan i think anyone who wants a “complete” view ought to stop expecting that for replies (short of recursively crawling the whole web) and instead work toward a distribution model where conversations exist in some context and are managed by the server responsible for that context. (see fep-7888 for a description of how context could work normatively, but tldr: send your Create to the context.attributedTo and they’ll distribute an Add which you can forward to your followers) 
Evan Prodromou
@trwnh I don't know what you're talking about. Every reply should include the original poster in their addressing, and the original poster's server should maintain the `replies` collection. Mastodon does this already. The `replies` collection should be an accurate record of the direct replies to a post.
infinite love ⴳ
@evan it's possible to drop someone from addressing when you reply to them. see the next reply.
Evan Prodromou
@trwnh Sorry, I meant the `to` property, not the `Mention` property. I'll check to see if that drops me from `to` also.
Evan Prodromou
@trwnh it does! Not a fan of that feature, but OK. So that wouldn't show up in `replies`.
Evan Prodromou
@trwnh `replies` is still the right place to look for direct replies to a content object or activity. If someone goes out of their way not to allow their reply to go there, that's fine.
Evan Prodromou
@trwnh I definitely like your suggestion that `Add` or maybe `Approve` would make sense for notifications to other addressees. Way better than just injecting the `Create` into the OP's outbox. |
@trwnh yes, that's correct. But if you use the Mastodon API, it searches the local server for posts in the same conversation, so you get conversation fragmentation. Using AP to get the `replies` collection will get all direct replies (and you can get the full tree by getting the replies of each of those, and so on). It's a way to hack around fragmentation.