i don't think i've really verbalized this before, but it actually doesn't make sense to me to use `inReplyTo`/`replies` as a way to recursively iterate through or in any way represent a "conversation". part of why i think everyone should use `context` instead is because it explicitly is intended for grouping things together, i.e. establishing the bounds of a "conversation". the real role of "replies" ought to be for directly responding to things and for listing direct responses to things.

the reason for this is more apparent when you step outside of the realm of twitter clones and look at something like blogs or forums instead. in those contexts, a "reply" is very clearly a response to a specific thing. in a blog in particular, you can show "responses to this article" as a separate thing from "comments section for this article". it's certainly possible to merge the two into a singular collection, but it's also possible (and to me, makes more sense) to have them be separate things

you can write blog posts in response to blog posts, where each of them have their own distinct comments sections. you can fork a forum thread so that the first post in the new thread is replying to something from the old thread, even though they're two different threads. plenty of examples demonstrate how and why you should not treat a chain or tree of responses as a stand-in for an actual conversation or thread.

@trwnh It's not an either-or situation in AS2 / ActivityPub. context is indeed meant to allow expressing something as part of a conversation, collection, and even something specific, w/o preventing its use alongside an inReplyTo. Neither of these are singular concepts, so something can have multiple contexts/inReplyTos.

See e.g., an Article (in HTML+RDFa) using inReplyTo and context:

Linked Web Storage Invited Expert Request

(csarven.ca)

If you prefer JSON-LD:

curl -H'Accept: application/ld+json' https://csarven.ca/linked-web-storage-invited-expert-request

@csarven yep, exactly! it’s so limiting to say that there can only ever be 1 replied-to object and 0 context.