@evan @erincandescent @julian @silverpill I don't think a thread *has* to be a tree -- it's a set. The "reply tree" is a separate structure. Threads can be forked out of other threads.

(I also dislike "reverse chron" and heavily favor "forward chron", but custom sorting of collections is not well-specced rn so that's a future step.)

@julian I reported this to you because one user asked me by "why I can't discover this NodeBB thread from my instance?". I think this is going to happen quite often across the Fediverse.
Maybe in the future we will figure out how to deal with these collections, but right now this leads to a bad user experience

@trwnh @evan @erincandescent @evan

@julian @Erin I'm not a dev, so I don't have the technical details down pat.

But Friendica and everything that came after it, including Hubzilla, handle conversations as something enclosed with exactly one (1) post and otherwise only comments, as opposed to Mastodon's loose chain of posts. Replies are always comments instead of posts, and they're always sent to the thread starter who is the owner of the whole thread, and who then distributes them to all participants.

Right after Friendica, permissions were introduced. These aren't stored with each comment separately and with the post only for the post itself. Rather, they're unified for the whole thread. The thread starter defines who is allowed to see what and who is allowed to do what. As opposed to Mastodon, commenters cannot change the permissions of their comments away from those of the start post.

Last year, (streams) switched to conversations as containers. To the outward, it works the same, but internally, it's different. Again, I'm not a dev. @Mike Macgirvin ️ has made all this. But to my understanding, this is when a thread really became an object of its own.

CC: @infinite love ⴳ @Evan Prodromou @silverpill

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Conversations

@silverpill @evan@cosocial.ca @erincandescent @julian @evan@community.nodebb.org I'd prefer impls update to support showing threads/collections, rather than NodeBB being held back. UX will get better as other impls update.

At the very least, browser.pub can do it!

@trwnh @evan @erincandescent @julian +1 for forward chron, that way you can start displaying posts without fetching the whole thread

@silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @julian Use the `last` property to start with the oldest page.

@silverpill @trwnh @erincandescent @julian Also, I think you're imagining some kind of pre-order traversal sorting. If you want that, it's a lot easier to just walk the `replies` tree.

@trwnh @silverpill @evan @julian @evan so, truthfully, I'm ambivalent to whether a thread object exists. But if it does, I feel like it should probably be reified distinctly from the thread collection primarily because I don't think treating collections as objects is a good idea. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my strongly held opinion!

And yeah, then we can give threads a following collection and let people follow them as they wish.

@erincandescent @julian @evan@community.nodebb.org @trwnh @silverpill WTF

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian just seems backwards to me, for no real reason. if you wanted reverse chron viewing of a forward chron collection, then it makes sense to fetch `last` and page backwards.

at the very least, `startIndex` as a property of OrderedCollectionPage makes **way** more sense with a forward chron presentation.

@trwnh @silverpill @erincandescent @julian

It's bad for caching to do forward chron, which is why we don't do it anywhere else.

Also, it does not help you build a tree structure; older nodes are not necessarily at the top of the tree.

@trwnh @evan @evan @julian @silverpill and to be clear my ambivalence about whether there should be a thread object comes primarily because I don't think this is a point on which we will ever get universal agreement

It's an area where I feel the only real route is the "why not both?" compromise that doesn't really make anyone happy

@erincandescent @julian @evan@community.nodebb.org @trwnh @silverpill Standards are about making arbitrary decisions in the pursuit of uniformity.

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian why is it bad for caching? it seems like the opposite to me -- reverse-chron means that pages are constantly updating and are almost never consistent! each new item in the collection pushes everything else behind it, and the last item of the page overflows into becoming the first item of the next page. if you did forward-chron, you could freeze "page 1" as soon as it got full, and move onto "page 2".

also, a viewer can easily tell where they left off.

@trwnh @silverpill @erincandescent @julian oh, yes, that's true, if you do "volatile paging" (last 20 pages).

If you have reified pages (item goes in one page and stays there), once the pages are full, they don't change (except for `Remove` activities).

Don't do volatile paging.

If you use reified pages, an add to a reverse-chron collection will typically have changes to `first` and the Collection itself.

@trwnh @silverpill @erincandescent @julian

If you have bidirectional links (`first` and `last`) you can have stable collections with rev-chron or forward-chron. So, fair point.

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian relevant thread: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/stricter-specifications-for-pagination-of-collections-and-orderedcollections/2633

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian Yeah, my point is that it seems almost entirely conventional whether to have "reverse" mean first.next.next... or last.prev.prev... -- and I favor the latter approach because it makes more sense imo, no double-inversion ("reverse-reverse chron", anyone?)

@trwnh @silverpill @erincandescent @julian Except for most interfaces, your first page is the current stuff, and you go back in time to find earlier stuff.

@evan @silverpill @erincandescent @julian This is what I meant by "conventional". On a forum thread, you generally read forward. On social media like Twitter, there is a heavy bias toward going reverse. And some interfaces even let you choose ascending or descending order.