CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@smallcircles @silverpill
@HolosSocial Holos Social is interesting, but to avoid confusion, the phone app is not a "full AP server". It can't federate without an external relay server, for example. Although it combines both client-like and server-like functionality, I don't see it as an alternative to C2S. With C2S I'd be able to access my account/actor from a phone, a tablet, and desktop and laptop computers with different clients. Holos Social binds the actor to a single phone IIUC.

@smallcircles @jerger I feel like using C2S client and S2S server is a bit more precise than "app" for this thread. At this point, I haven't been able to determine how you define "app".

@smallcircles @jerger > In the case you mention it becomes confusing to still use client/server terminology.

In this case, I think the terms makes sense in the specific content of #ActivityPub clients and servers. There's significant overlap in the behaviors of the two, but there are significant differences too. For example, a client cannot federate and often runs in an environment where it can't expose listening sockets (browser, behind a firewall, etc.).

@mariusor Yes, I'm seeing it in a real server while doing C2S testing/exploration. In this case, the server can handle Note and Article, in general, so I don't the rationale yet for the conversion. It's in pre-release code so it may or may not be intentional.

@mariusor Like you said, I'm not sure the user (rather than the client dev) cares about details like the AP object type. However, they may care from a UX perspective if their messages are silently dropped (during S2S federation because the type was changed). And if they do care, they'll probably complain to the client developer who didn't cause the problem.

@mariusor And I'm thinking of a general C2S client (not one developed by the server developer for that specific server). The client developer might care for technical reasons. For example, some servers don't support Article S2S federation so the example I described (converting Note to Article in the server) could have undesired results.

@mariusor Like I said, this is a C2S context. Let's say they do know. Your opinion is that the user should not care? I'm guessing there are other kinds of C2S server-side changes that you'd believe they would care about (changing content, addressing, etc.).

I'm curious what other devs think about this. If an actor posts an C2S #ActivityPub Create/Note to the outbox, what would you think if the object created by the server was a different type (e.g., Article)?