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This entry was edited (2 years ago)

reshared this

How does Mastodon see the deletions? Does it just ignore the request?
@Hal You can't delete other people's posts in Mastodon that I know of. If an author deletes their own post, then its deletion will be propagated to all their followers, but that's about it.
@Hal
Oh no I meant. If you make a thread on Diaspora, someone from Mastodon replies, and you try to delete that reply ... what happens? What do you as the thread creator on Diaspora see? What does the person on Mastodon see?
@Hal Diaspora and Mastodon aren't compatible at the moment as neither of them currently supports the other one's protocol (Diaspora for Diaspora, ActivityPub for Mastodon). This means Mastodon users can't interact in any way with Diaspora posts and vice-versa.
@Hal
This entry was edited (2 years ago)
Diaspora Activitypub when. I mean, we can't have this fragmentation.

@zzz
@Hal
@Dr. Quadragon ❌ I don't believe this is something we should wish for. Diaspora has some very opinionated behaviors like the one I mentioned, and in Friendica we're struggling with supporting both protocols in a seamless manner, even beyond the "Mastodon followers can't see Diaspora replies and vice-versa".
@drq

I just want in Mastodon the ability to disable and delete replies to posts. Is that so much to ask?
@Hal It might, depending on what the protocol allows. If there's no possible separation between authorship and ownership in ActivityPub, then you will not be able to cryptographically sign a deletion message for a post you didn't write yourself, and as a result remote servers should reject any such attempt.
@Hal
@zzz this is something we *really* need to work on, on the AP spec side. I wonder if anyone has attempted a FEP draft yet with proposals to fix this at the AP level
@Hal
'replyTo' works well in this situation. Works just like email and signals that the collection model is in effect. I'd write an FEP but nobody is interested in anything I do.
@liaizon
Yes but the discussion went nowhere https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/319
@zzz looking into this a bit more after this discussuon and see there is a FEB right now asking for feedback about this exact issue. https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-5624-per-object-reply-control-policies/2666/2

Would be really good to get more eyes on this and more feedback as to what is good and what is not about the purposed solution.
@Hal
@liaizon
I'm glad to see @trwnh has come around on the utility of this feature. I also entirely agree with them about this being something you likely want for all possible interactions.

The ability to disable replies / reactions / quotes / DMs / being mentioned, etc. I actually think the harms of QTs could be greatly mitigated if someone had to consent to being quoted.
@zzz@liaizon wait wdym "came around"? i don't recall ever being opposed to disabling replies πŸ˜…
@trwnh@liaizon
Ahem https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/104286827691231545
@zzz@liaizon pointing out the challenges should not be construed as an argument against something
@zzz@liaizon also https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/104287064560502661 lol
@trwnh@liaizon
I think the FEP is a step in the right direction, and much more considered than our reply thread. It also offers some hope that maybe even Mastodon will implement the proposal assuming it gets accepted.
@trwnh@liaizon
My only concern about the FEP is that the set of people who are allowed to reply ought to be left open-ended with the listed collections just being the ones a server SHOULD support.

I'll make a comment about this concern in the discussion thread so it could be recorded.
@zzz@liaizon they're all SHOULD not MUST so it's fine i think
@trwnh@liaizon
My hope was supporting any collection so even something like a list of instances could be supported
@zzz@liaizon zot has commentPolicy which is a string that allows for domain selectors but that would be hard to express in an activitypub-y way. however, i'm also not sure it's a good idea to encode "a list of instances" though -- you could have a potentially unbounded list, and they'd have to be referred to by domain name, but an instance might be reinstalled on the same domain at any time...

Mike Macgirvin doesn't like this.

@zzz@liaizon personally what i'd like to see is "friend-of-a-friend" semantics although idk how that would be expressed
@trwnh@liaizon
What I actually want is to be able to have saved queries that can be referred to. But something like a community centered discussion is hard to promote without being able to refer to instances somehow.
@zzz@trwnh the FEP is by Claire so I would assume it will get implemented in glitch even if its not accepted into masto mainline
@liaizon@zzz claire and i were hammering it out with the intent of having it be a mainline masto thing iirc
FEP-5624 is pretty close to what we were doing with moderated posts in Nomad anyway, so I don't see any problem adopting it. Just need to add the approval workflow to regular comments and friend-of-friend conversations. As long as I can squeeze in and hour or two a day for fediverse development I should have it completed in a day or three.
ActivityPub allows it (and Mammoth supports it). Mastodon doesn’t care if the message to which another message is replying exists on the server or not; it displays them all. The federation model should be immaterial; in all cases the servers should strive for a consistent graph of replies/likes/etc.

I spent an inordinate amount of time working on different federation models, and both Diaspora’s β€œparent federates” and Mastodon’s β€œchild federates” models have significant downsides when it comes to scale and graph consistency. It would be better if the servers could distribute federation via something akin to a forwarder that is purpose-built for scale (e.g., on a serverless environment).

I’d really like to see what the Twitter team came up with as a hybrid to solve the problem. It’s one of the most important problems to solve for a federated social network.
@Brad Koehn β˜‘οΈ Oh, how's Mammoth doing? I haven't seen you post from it for a while now!
It’s pretty much in stasis. Probably abandonedware.
@Brad Koehn β˜‘οΈ I'm sorry to hear that, I hope it was fun while it lasted!
Instead of a group owner relaying/deleting a post/comment to their group, what they can do instead is create activities to add or remove it from their inbox collection (or a collection devoted to a conversation), which accomplishes the same thing. This is entirely legal, even with Mastodon's interpretation of the relevant specs.

wakest ⁂ reshared this.

@Mike Macgirvin Thank you for the concise and helpful reply, unfortunately this is already above my pay grade and I would have to defer to @Michael Vogel for the actual implementation.
Anyway, the problem still exists even if you personally use Friendica and Friendica solves the viewing problem for you. The thing is ... even if you get the view you desire, almost everyone else is using Mastodon so they don't see what you're seeing. They just see random context-less replies, and even when they click they see some weird subset of the replies.
Could this problem be solved (or at least mitigated) at compose time, by making it easier for users to quote the bits of text that they are replying to?

If the technology supports it, then there's the question of getting users to adopt the practice; good UI for it would be necessary but admittedly not sufficient.

But it's a model that works reasonably well in vBulletin-style forums. Users all know that replies get rendered in series rather than in a tree, so people tend to use quoting to help their replies make sense. The drawbacks are extra steps in the compose process, and it takes a bit of skill / give-a-damn to do it right. It's a bit too easy to quote very large messages and then add two or three words, which isn't great for the signal-to-noise ratio.
@natewaddoups I like the throwback idea, but it's unworkable in the ActivityPub context of microblogging.
@Hypolite Petovan
I don't thiink it is desirable that the original poster have any kind of ownership right to someone else's posts. Imho, all the should be able to do is decoupling the comment (and it's subtree) from their thread
@Liwott Why not? When you leave a reply on a conversation, you involve the original poster in a way you don't when you start a conversation yourself.

This is also a way to decentralize moderation even further. No need to file a moderation report about a reply on your own posts violating your server's rules or even your own sensibility. It further empower users and encourages to curate follows as well.
@Hypolite Petovan
The comment is itself a creation. Just because the owner does not think it fits their conversation does not mean the author has to lose their production or the ability to show it to their own followers.

However, I agree that it is better that the owner be responsible with distributing replies to the original recipients and that they be able to exclude a subtree from this procedure. But in that case I think the comment should be turned into a quote-share and normally distributed to its author's followers rather than deleted.
@Liwott
The comment is itself a creation. Just because the owner does not think it fits their conversation does not mean the author has to lose their production or the ability to show it to their own followers.
This is very debatable. Having a comment deleted doesn't mean an author loses the ability to publish to their followers. Just not with a reply on someone else's post.

Mastodon has a very opinionated approach to this by not allowing quoting posts in top-level publications, favoring direct replies, but not making the original author responsible for replies distribution either, which favors public posts.

Diaspora is the complete opposite, where direct boosts aren't allowed, other people's posts must be quoted in a new post, even if there's no additional content, and top-level authors have complete responsibility over the ensuing conversations. This favors limited-visibility publication scope and reacting to posts by quoting them in a new thread where you can have complete moderation control.

Your idea would be in-between those extremes.
@Hypolite Petovan Bear in mind that a lot of folks view moderation itself to be inherently undesirable.

Oh, BTW, I need to make a minor correction to what I said earlier about Tumblr. I forgot that a few years ago Tumblr added a comment feature. The original poster does "own" the conversation on the comments. So it's a hybrid system. However, the comment feature is sort of tacked on, and the comments aren't visible unless you click on the post.

The primary way "conversations" happen in Tumblr is via reblogs - often with added commentary. It's sort of like classic e-mail or USENET that way.
We’re conflating moderation with federation and they’re not the same thing. In either federation model the owner of the thread can send a request to delete a comment/reply; in either model the recipient servers can choose to honor the request or not. ActivityPub allows anyone to send a delete message associated with the ID of any other message to any recipient. The receiving server has to decide what to do in response to that message; there’s no defined behavior in the specification indicating what should happen.

IIRC Mastodon will ignore delete messages associated to messages from another author.
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