Signifying an audience in an object (PieFed/Lemmy)

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Hi @andrew_s@piefed.social/@freamon and @nutomic@lemmy.ml —I'm working (not-so-secretly) on refactoring NodeBB so that it is able to "browse" remote audiences/group actors, and that would include things like PieFed and Lemmy communities.

N.B. Given varied nomenclature (group/category/community/subforum), the ForumWG calls this structure an "audience".

Where I am at now is working through the logic for slotting an object into a category.

The most obvious choice here would be to look at as:audience. It's even specified in 1b12, and the majority of threaded implementations follow 1b12.

I am making this post because nutomic explicitly removed the audience from being served in Lemmy (as of January this year), so I don't think relying on that property would be wise.

I asked in that issue whether Lemmy finds community via to/cc (it does). Does PieFed do the same?

Would this also open up the possibility of a topic/context being part of multiple audiences/communities? Interesting...

[bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de]

@julian@community.nodebb.org Interesting, I though that the audience field was the way it should be done and to/cc fields were just for backwards compat

[bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de]

@julian@community.nodebb.org Mbin uses all 3 fields for what its worth

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de ah that's good to know.

Perhaps the solution is to use audience if explicitly defined, then fall back to to/cc otherwise.

[bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de]

@julian@community.nodebb.org right now we just collect all links in these 3 fields and select the first magazine/community/group from the db having this url as their public url

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de okay

Apologies for not mentioning you up top. I did not know you were the maintainer for mbin, but now I do!

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian @andrew_s @nutomic being part of multiple audiences has always been possible, it's just rejected by overly strict implementers or unhandled by naive ones

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian @andrew_s @nutomic btw there's a reason that section of as2-vocab is called "context and audience"... they are sister properties. one scopes by purpose of when it should be seen, the other by intent of who should see it. (this is also why the rationale for fep-7888 uses the phrase "purpose and intent" when talking about why not use a tag)

[Guest]

I asked in that issue whether Lemmy finds community via to/cc (it does). Does PieFed do the same?

Yes - PieFed does the same. It looks in 'audience', then 'cc', then 'to'. It has to, to support all the platforms that haven't adopted 'audience. It's a convenient field, but PieFed won't be affected if Lemmy goes through with removing it.

Would this also open up the possibility of a topic/context being part of multiple audiences/communities?

Not at present. If you do something like cc: [community1, community2] it will only go to community1 (on both Lemmy and PieFed). There's so many activities that are effectively duplicates, both in normal operation and when platforms are bugged (both Lemmy and Mastodon have gone through phases of sending the same activity multiple times), that you need a way to make sure you're only processing one. On PieFed, this is done by having a UNIQUE constraint of the 'ap_id' column of the Post table (the ap_id of your post is https://community.nodebb.org/post/103806), so it means you can't have the same post in more than one community.