@trwnh is the relationship between a thing i wrote and another thing to which it’s related not a function of my intentions? like, if i “boost” a post, without any other context, that act has a pretty limited meaning; it’s essentially broadcasting. but if i “endorse” a post, the act of endorsing rather than simply boosting conveys a distinct relationship between my action and that post; it’s distinct because endorsement means something very specific

@erincandescent that is indeed how i see it in most cases. in as2 we can probably reply in a different context

@trwnh @djsundog I am not sold on the idea that changing `context` in the encoded data actually does anything other than provide a hint to clients that "something ineffable has changed, do what thou wilt". I think changing `context` is necessary but not sufficient. HOWEVER, I am open to the possibility that the real work is on implementations to rigorously consider what `context` is and how it should inform their logic and rendering

@Craigp so is it just setting a different `context` or is there more to it?

@t54r4n1 i don’t like it either but i am trying to describe the general case where no one is dunking and the quoter is actually below the quote.

to the extent that such a thing exists, anyway

@grishka so it’s just a link then? possibly a sort of attachment?

@trwnh I'd say that that is simultaneously too narrow and too wide. Too narrow if it's to say something about intent, and too wide if it's about display.
I don't think the first (intent) is possible to enumerate, but the second absolutely is. Then I'd maybe simply do something like `rel` for an anchor and use `display='embed'`, `display='preview'` or `display='link'`, maybe as links in a context-collection or something.

@trwnh I would say “incorporates as direct context” rather than the “refers to as linked context” that a link implies. It was stronger when Twitter had the 140-character limit, which led style guides to declare that a canonical reference to a tweet was to include the entire tweet.

@trwnh I see that AS2 links already have a rel property. Might be usable here?

@a @darius so a link where the href is a “post” and then you fetch the “live” data instead of embedding a frozen repr

@darius @trwnh I agree! it'd be one thing if the systems involved defined the constituent parts of a context, so that there'd be value in possibly providing a link to the original context, but I'm pretty sure that's not a thing here (yet?) so it's definitely not sufficient in and of itself. I personally don't think "quote post" is anything more than "link to thing I guarantee is an activitypub object rather than some other type of web content", and I'd prefer to see the fediverse move to rendering embedded references to other fediverse content inline, but that it should be all client rendering decisions ultimately anyway, I think.

@tom the quirk here is that you can respond to something without addressing the author of the thing you’re responding to. response, audience, context are all on a separate axis

the open question is how to link to the “thing being quoted”. an existing property, or a new property? if a new property, how do we define that new property clearly?

“A is related to B where A isQuoteOf B” raises the immediate question of what “isQuoteOf” is supposed to mean precisely.

@djsundog @trwnh yeah exactly!

@darius @trwnh I think a client that recognized an activitypub embed, dereferenced it, saw it was a reply, and included a "via" link to the top of thread activitypub object could be pretty neat! I'd probably really enjoy having that contextual clue that the quoted bit is part of a larger picture regardless of the intent of the person quoting it. but I really feel like this is all presentation not protocol.

@agnes so it’s a kind of citation? like how you might use <blockquote cite=“”> in HTML or is it a different kind of citation.

if i had A and B and i said “A isQuoteOf B”, is there a meaningful definition for “isQuoteOf” or is it instead a combination of other factors (context, audience, response, and so on)

@tante “commentary” or “response” seem to be the closest things here. but the rest of it is expressible via different existing properties — audience and context in particular.

@tech_himbo in the case of a boost we instead describe the action of Announcing the existence of the object. if you were to Endorse a post then that makes sense as a separate activity.

alternatively from a different perspective: you could represent not the act itself, but the relation or property. generically you might have an Annotation framework where the purpose of the anno is “endorsement”.

Just like we have `inReplyTo` right now, we might similarly notify the author that we have Reply’d.

@trwnh huh, never seen such an implementation

@t54r4n1 @trwnh yeah there's a "comment below the quote" proposal I looked at recently that actually feels like a decent compromise

@darius @djsundog this does require an understanding of `context` as “put this thing in a different grouping”, yes.

ie if someone declared inReplyTo + a different context, and Mastodon saw it and ignored context, it would look like a “regular reply”. but that doesn’t change the fact that it is what it is.