The full minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting (held on 7 November) can be found at this Google Docs link

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

Of note:

SWICG ForumWG GitHub repo used to keep track of high level discussion items

  • Repo url: https://github.com/swicg/forums
  • Issue tracker contains details regarding high-level items discussed at monthly meetings (and on the fediverse between meetings)
  • Very early draft report of Conversational Contexts in ActivityPub accessible at https://swicg.github.io/forums/ — just headers and an intro so far

Mastodon and its treatment of non-note items

  • Darius Kazemi (@darius@friend.camp) of Hometown put together a light fork of Mastodon that could be merged upstream. It utilises the “read more” functionality to display longer-form content and runs the content of non-note objects through the same parsing that regular notes get.
  • Emphasizes that it is not an open PR yet, while discussions are ongoing with Renaud and the Mastodon team. “This is 118 lines of code, touches 4 files. Not huge.”
  • Some edge cases: How do we handle additional media beyond the cap of 4 currently in place by Mastodon?
  • Emelia (@thisismissem@hachyderm.io) also brings up concerns re: text-field length and a sensible maximum across implementations.
  • Evan (@evan@cosocial.ca) brings up the possibility of this PR making it into Mastodon 4.4, Claire (@claire@sitedethib.com) acknowleges the possibility
  • Darius will write up a summarization and demo video for presentation to the Mastodon team

FEP 7888 and 76ea

  • There are still outstanding conflicts between FEPs 7888 and 76ea
    • Beyond the main difference (7888 uses as:context, 76ea uses thr:threads under a new namespace), some philosphical differences persist.
    • e.g. whether the 76ea’s definition of an explicit “reply tree” is adequate to describe the multitude of shapes that a conversation can take
  • a (@trwnh@mastodon.social) and Evan informally pledge to work together to come to a resolution

Voting re: FEP convergence

  • A motion was made by Julian to defer a subsequent motion regarding FEP convergence to a later to-be-determined date pending resolution of the 7888/76ea conflict
  • Majority abstained, with two ayes. Resolved.

Context collection items: activities or objects?

  • Julian: should a resolvable context collection contain activities (create, like, EmojiReact, etc.), or simple objects?
  • Evan makes the case that simpler is better (needing to diff. activities may present a complication for implementors)
  • a suggests a reframing as a two-way negotiation of what gets declared vs. approved
  • This topic was cut short due to timing
  • julian@community.nodebb.orgOP
    0·
    7 hours ago

    @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu said in Minutes from 7 November 2024 WG Meeting:

    So the appropriate way for Mastodon to support Article-type objects can only include no longer “sanitising” all the formatting out of them and finally allowing a much, much larger subset of HTML formatting, explicitly including an unlimited number of embedded inline images.

    That is exactly what @darius@friend.camp’s PR aims to accomplish. Core members of the Mastodon dev team (namely @renchap@oisaur.com and @claire@sitedethib.com) have been gracious enough to explore this opportunity to have Mastodon treat non-note objects with a kinder approach, one that we are more than happy to work with them on.

    I bet that they are also tired of having the same conversations about handling non-note objects. I think I am already responsible for at least two of them :stuck_out_tongue:

    Will they support inline images? That is one point I expect to be sticky. We shall see.

    One thing I will say is that Mastodon in the years since your history has expanded their support for long-form post content, which paves the way for moving the baseline behaviour even more so toward a level that other implementors would be happier with.

    My end goal here is not that Mastodon should natively support every object type under the sun. However, other implementors should not feel the need to translate their content into as:Note in order to be consumed by a significant portion of the fediverse.

    Nevertheless, thank you for providing your written history on the subject, it is always helpful to be reminded.