nikclayton:The comment I was responding to (and support) says:The biggest problem I see is that current wording make it sound like any server not understanding the FEP is automatically malicious.
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nikclayton:
trwnh:The comment I was responding to (and support) says:
The biggest problem I see is that current wording make it sound like any server not understanding the FEP is automatically malicious. But if it’s optional, it’s not malicious to not have it.
My point is that a user directing their user agent, connected to a server that supports this FEP
The confusion likely stems from “server” being ambiguously used in the same sense as “Mastodon/etc instance” and not “ActivityPub server”.
A user might direct their user agent toward a "server" which is itself an "ActivityPub client". The considerations of the user agent are not the same as the considerations of a "client"; there are in fact multiple layers of "client" relations. Mastodon et al are in effect HTTP user agents that transform and re-expose information via the Mastodon API.
My citing potential policies of individual actors or their host services is meant to illustrate that those policies are applied without affecting the canonical representation of anything. The transformations are "out of scope" because it's not in anyone's control what others end up doing with a resource. As far as a publisher is concerned, someone generated an AS2 document and they're making it available. As far as a consumer is concerned, that AS2 document may or may not contain something that could be interpreted as a "quote post", and there may or may not be a stamp associated with it.
nikclayton:I find it hard to agree that concerns that – may be – Mastodon specific are out of scope for this discussion, when the preamble for the pre-FEP starts
Quote Posts are an often-requested feature for Mastodon
and goes on to say
This is a work-in-progress document describing Mastodon’s proposed way of representing quote posts
And as I said upthread, “some of my questions below are driven by user experience considerations. It’s my experience that failing to consider the desired end user experience early enough in the process can result in specs that are not suitable”.
It may be that we disagree, but my position is that the "end user" and the "end user experience" is not in any way required to conform to Mastodon's expectations. Overfitting to "user experience" makes the protocol far more limited in a way that isn't necessarily good. The suitability of a spec like this is not in whether it works for Mastodon, but in whether it works broadly and generally to things that may or may not be anything like Mastodon. The fediverse consists of more than just Mastodon, and more than just microblogging. At the level we're working with here, there is no such thing as a "post" or a "status", there is only an Object with a Link tag, and that Link may or may not have proof of consent attached. There's a million things you can do with that, and I'm not sure how useful it is to enumerate those things and consider them individually.
