Recommendation: encourage activitypub software to use the replies collections and have reply-control

[ThisIsMissEm]

This is something that has come up in numerous conversations about the taskforce, and is something I think we can make a recommendation on in the report that we publish: currently the biggest open-source activitypub implementation out there, Mastodon, does not implement usage of the replies collection, leading to a lot of abuse issues, and ultimately driving people from the fediverse.

I believe we can add language to the report that we produce to encourage implementers to use the replies collection and to implement reply controls.

[ThisIsMissEm]

@evanp @dmitrizagidulin is this something we can actually do within the taskforce's report?

[trwnh]

i think in conjunction to this it would also be valuable to encourage usage of context to represent a thread/conversation. replies are a parallel structure and are useful to track direct responses, but any "control" does not propagate through the reply tree, so every replies collection is only ever managed by each individual post's author

in addition to both replies and context i would also point toward https://w3id.org/fep/0391 as a way to "prove" that an object was Added to a special collection, by pointing to the Add activity that did it as a sort of "stamp"

[ThisIsMissEm]

Original discussion on Reply Controls via @trwnh — https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-5624-per-object-reply-control-policies/2723

[ThisIsMissEm]

Additionally from @trwnh using Reply Collections: https://w3id.org/fep/7458