if there’s one thing i really hate about post-twitter social media, it’s the idea that “replying to someone on their timeline means you are in their space” and also the idea that “someone else started the thread so you are also in their space”

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

if there’s one thing i really hate about post-twitter social media, it’s the idea that “replying to someone on their timeline means you are in their space” and also the idea that “someone else started the thread so you are also in their space”

the problem is that this “space” does not exist. it is not real. it is at best based on social norms which are not universal. i am just as much in my *own* “space” posting to my own (micro)“blog”. we should disentangle and reify these different contexts.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

i continue to maintain that if you want to have a “thread” that you control, then actually make that a real thing. that “my thing is a response to your thing” should not have any bearing on you. i am allowed to respond to things. the problem arises entirely due to social expectations which are built on context collapse. on post-twitter social media, you have unstated social rules that it’s really easy to not be aware of. do i need to say that having to be aware of unstated assumptions is bad?

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

consider me writing a blog post on my own blog, perhaps as a response to someone else’s insightful post on mastodon. i mark my blog post as “inReplyTo” that mastodon post, because it is! i am being semantically correct. however, when it arrives in mastodon, then mastodon will ignore contextual properties like “context” and “audience”. it will pretty much only care about “inReplyTo”, privileging it in a way that it should not be privileged. this might appear in “their” “thread”. am i trespassing?

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

i think it is ludicrous to expect everyone to share the same assumptions that the thing you are replying to is uniquely special and the thing at the start of the reply chain is extra special.

in general, expecting everyone to share assumptions is ludicrous on its own. those assumptions should be codified clearly and unambiguously.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

and that’s what the Web is *supposed* to be built on — the relations and links between various things. “A is a response to B” is just one such relation. it does not imply “A exists in context of C” or “A was intended for audience D”. those are separate properties. there is a *possibility* that A inherits context or audience from B, but not a *guarantee*.

in plain english: my blog post is in reply to the mastodon post, but it exists in context of my blog, and its audience is my blog’s audience.

[fluffy@plush.city]

@trwnh I absolutely agree and one of the things I kind of dislike about the IndieWeb webmention view of things is that it tries to treat all web-based interactions as equivalent to timeline-based interactions

and like, timeline-based social media is IMO the worst thing that's ever happened to online interaction

I am always a champion of the idea that blogs should have their own comments, under the moderation authority of the blogger. Everything else is just noise.

[fluffy@plush.city]

@trwnh webmentions are pretty okay as a notification mechanism for finding out about external interactions, but they're a godawful way to maintain an actual conversation

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

the social choice you have when responding is to decide whether to defer to some existing context and audience, or whether to declare some different context and audience.

in return, the person you are replying to has a different social choice: whether to acknowledge your response as a response, and whether to distribute to or make aware their audience.

it’s like viewing a web page directly, or googling for all pages that link to the current page. we currently take “reverse search” for granted.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@fluffy yeah i think the approach i’d consider is

1) you can explicitly start a conversation elsewhere as a forum style thread
2) you can declare your conversation to be a response to the thing being discussed
3) you notify the controller of the thing you are replying to with your discussion
4) the controller of the thing acknowledges your discussion as a response

so you have a post A and a collection B inReplyTo A. A.replies includes B. yes this breaks assumptions. the assumptions are bad.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@fluffy this basically is like a webmention saying “hey we started a forum thread on external-forum to discuss this article” and then the discussion thread is maintained separately from the article. multiple discussion threads can exist. standalone articles can also exist as responses. the replies collection is roughly equivalent to your webmentions for that given article.