@thisismissem @smallcircles I’m not sure how you define “social meaning”, but if you Add a Boop to my boops collection you socially booped me. I suppose a Boop activity is needed either way, but overloading the meaning to include implicit collection management seems dubious to me.

@thisismissem @smallcircles Per the AP spec… “The side effect of receiving this in an inbox is that the server SHOULD increment the object's count of likes by adding the received **activity** to the likes collection if this collection is present.” (emphasis mine)

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles yeah, and this is a side effect of the activity (e.g., Like) adding to both my likes collection and the likes collection on your post.

So would my add be targeting two collections with an Activity?

What about Announce? That's add to my outbox, add to my boosts collection, and add to your post's boost collection.

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles I suspect this is incorrect. I am pretty sure the likes collection contains only objects, not the activities.

@evan was there an erratum for this? I feel like there was?

@smallcircles @eyeinthesky yeah, making everything an Actor is certainly a choice, and you could do that

@thisismissem @smallcircles @evan It makes sense to me. Someone liked a local object. We wouldn’t add the liked object to the liked object “likes” collection (it would be the same object). It seems that only the activity (and collection count) is interesting. Maybe you are thinking about the “liked” collection? (Different topic, but it seems that this *should* be a collection of activities too. Dropping the activity loses info such as the Like timestamp.)

@thisismissem @eyeinthesky

The biggest folly imho is this idea of "let's cram every domain into #ActivityStreams somehow". Flatten everything and project it onto this small set of social primitives that AS defines.

It is once more a choice of pragmatism: "Hey, I've seen it working with Mastodon, so I copied that. And #LinkedData extension mechanism is a handwaved horror show".

So understandable perhaps that we did it. But now we must overcome this trend which has taken stubborn root and drags the ecosystem down.

@eyeinthesky I think Add / Remove should be used for extended collections. Like, Announce etc look like legacy / tech debt to me.

@silverpill@mitra.social add and remove feel more like building blocks than actual activities.

It would never capture the nuance of many of the activities that it would purportedly represent.

@julian @thisismissem @eyeinthesky @mariusor @smallcircles

Yes, they are building blocks, together with Create, Update and Delete. Everything else can be constructed from them.

@julian @thisismissem @eyeinthesky @mariusor @smallcircles Maybe Offer, Accept and Reject are needed too. Follow can be replaced with Offer(Relationship), I am not sure if there's a way to do it with Add / Remove alone.

@julian @silverpill Add/Remove don’t replace the activity being added/removed so there’s no risk to nuance from my perspective. They make the collection side-effects explicit and consistent with other non-special collections. Sometimes the Add (or Remove) is the primary activity rather than only a building block (Add a member to my Group, Add an Article to my fave articles, Add a song to a social play list — maybe with an Announce of the Add sent to followers).

@mariusor
The earliest discussions on Activity Streams did constantly get stuck on which platforms' concepts were "real" and which was just an alias for another.

e.g. is a "tweet" the same thing as a blog post? As a status update on Facebook?
e.g. is listening to a podcast the same verb as watching a video on YouTube?
e.g. is "liking" the same verb as adding to a "Favorites" playlist?

In retrospect I think it was naive to try to be so specific, since it was too early for that, but alas. ‍️

@apparentlymart very interesting perspective, thank you.

@smallcircles @eyeinthesky I was mostly thinking of the Follow activity and the following collection: it doesn't contain Follow activities, it contains Actors: https://hachyderm.io/users/thisismissem/following?page=1

In Mastodon the "likes" collection for a Note doesn't even include the Actors, just the count: https://browser.pub/https%3A%2F%2Fhachyderm.io%2Fusers%2Fthisismissem%2Fstatuses%2F115622304738688291%2Flikes

@eyeinthesky @thisismissem @smallcircles i would use as:result for this -- the *result* when you Accept the Like activity is to Add it to the likes collection... if you care about that level of detail. most people only care about the Like. maybe even less than that! (synthesizing a statement such as :bob :likes :this.)

@thisismissem @eyeinthesky @smallcircles likes contains Like activities; shares contains Announce activities; the exception is followers not containing the Follow activity (or not having a follows collection) (or not doing the better thing which is subscription management)