CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@smallcircles “an interpretation that advocates for tolerating unexpected inputs is no longer considered best practice in all scenarios.” Somebody didn’t get the memo. lol

@smallcircles It's even crazier than that. I saw the thread a few days ago where @cwebber apologized for JSON-LD in AP and @evan defended it (but for backwards-compat, not because AP is linked data). The "extensibility" claim is technical gaslighting since that's only true if you use JSON-LD processing of AP data (practically no one does and there's no requirement to do it). 🤪 Even then it's a weak form of protocol extensibility.

Developer perspective on tradeoffs… #ATProto architecture is more centralized. #ActivityPub has JSON-LD. ️ So much pain and confusion, so little benefit and the Fedi Father refuses to consider JSON-LD alternatives because replacing the “feature” that almost no one actually uses with something useful will apparently break the Fediverse.

“This is why we can’t have nice things.” #fedidevs

@julian @silverpill Add/Remove don’t replace the activity being added/removed so there’s no risk to nuance from my perspective. They make the collection side-effects explicit and consistent with other non-special collections. Sometimes the Add (or Remove) is the primary activity rather than only a building block (Add a member to my Group, Add an Article to my fave articles, Add a song to a social play list — maybe with an Announce of the Add sent to followers).

@thisismissem @smallcircles @evan It makes sense to me. Someone liked a local object. We wouldn’t add the liked object to the liked object “likes” collection (it would be the same object). It seems that only the activity (and collection count) is interesting. Maybe you are thinking about the “liked” collection? (Different topic, but it seems that this *should* be a collection of activities too. Dropping the activity loses info such as the Like timestamp.)

@thisismissem @smallcircles Per the AP spec… “The side effect of receiving this in an inbox is that the server SHOULD increment the object's count of likes by adding the received **activity** to the likes collection if this collection is present.” (emphasis mine)

@thisismissem @smallcircles I’m not sure how you define “social meaning”, but if you Add a Boop to my boops collection you socially booped me. I suppose a Boop activity is needed either way, but overloading the meaning to include implicit collection management seems dubious to me.

@thisismissem @smallcircles The weird thing about Like+side_effects vs Add(Like activity to “likes collections”) is that the side effect is Add Like to “likes collection”. lol They are both one inbox activity.

@thisismissem @smallcircles If I define an extension that uses a collection, should I define a special activity for managing the collection instead of using Add/Remove?

@thisismissem @smallcircles I know feelings will vary, but it doesn’t feel cumbersome to me. It seems more logically consistent and less functionally redundant. Side-effects can still be defined for specific target collections. What do you recommend for extension collection management?

Why did #ActivityPub create special behaviors such as Like, Announce and Block (and the Undo variants) instead of using Add to or Remove from the associated Collection objects? I have a similar question for outbox and inbox POST, which is an implicit Add to those collections. When adding support for extended collections, is an new collection-specific Activity preferred over Add/Remove? FWIW, I see Mastodon uses Add/Remove for pinned and featured posts.