@Emelia @julian

I don't think there really will be a duplicate content issue. Typically, copies of posts are delivered to people's private inbox, not reposted publicly on other websites. Unless someone is operating a relay or reposting other people's posts, all of the copies of the post that are sent over ActivityPub should be private.

@crazycells Search engines would not see them. ActivityPub basically serves as a notification mechanism, except it delivers the entire post to the follower's private inbox and they can reply back without visiting the forum. Forum posts and comments do not get republished publicly.

scott:

Search engines would not see them.

This doesn't seem to be true.

The content of Julian's post at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/hi-julian-i-wonder-how-search-engines-and-seo-will/4135/12?u=stevebate is indexed with both socialhub and nodebb URLs.

Google SERP screenshot:

@julian The URL of this topic is https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17867/pre-alpha-activitypub-related-bug-reports
When I make a request with AP Accept header, the server responds with a Collection. Technically, this is not wrong, but I think most people would expect a top-level post (Note / Article) when making such request

@silverpill@mitra.social you're the first person to have noticed!

It's by design, but of course, can — and maybe should — change. It's part of @trwnh@mastodon.social's FEP-7888 and its concept of a resolvable collection.

Mapping the topic URL to the top post (or perhaps a redirect to it) would ensure compatibility with Mastodon, but I am unsure of whether that is the best path forward.

@julian @silverpill why would anyone expect a Note/Article when fetching the URL for an entire thread/topic?

@trwnh @julian @silverpill I'd only expect a Note/Article when explicitly requesting the first post in a thread/topic, not when fetching the topic itself

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io @trwnh@mastodon.social that was my thought as well, and why NodeBB currently responds as it does.

Ideally it could be both an Article and a Collection, but now we're really committing to incompatibility there lol

cc @silverpill@mitra.social

@julian @trwnh @silverpill I mean... theoretically ActivityPub allows for multi-typed objects due to json-ld

But will anyone understand that correctly? No idea.

@thisismissem @julian @silverpill you could generate a document that is both an Article and a Collection but i'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is probably *not* what you want. it's a thread. a thread is a Collection of posts. it's already "ideal" to represent it as a Collection and not an Article.

i suspect the source of confusion is that most other projects don't have threads/topics, they have reply trees which they show below the "top level" post. The URL there is for the post.

@trwnh @julian Because it is not clear how client should display this collection. Searching for URL is a common UI pattern: user expects to see a post or a profile as a result (this is not unique to Mastodon).

Server can attempt to fetch the first item in a collection, but NodeBB's FEP-7888 collection doesn't identify itself as a "thread". It has "OrderedCollectionPage" type and properties that many other collections also have

@silverpill@mitra.social said:

NodeBB's FEP-7888 collection doesn't identify itself as a "thread".

That's because I am not aware of a clear way to signal that my collection is a thread.

Lemmy uses as:Page, which is far too generic of an object type to signal as a thread. Mastodon doesn't even have an external concept of a conversation (oStatus conversation notwithstanding)

@trwnh@mastodon.social

@julian Another report: when NodeBB generates an Announce(Create) activity, the ID of Announce has wrong origin. Here's an example:

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "actor": "https://community.nodebb.org/category/30",
  "id": "https://mitra.social/objects/01920059-5b7c-203f-fc4e-285ec442c032#activity/announce/1726582718443",
  "object": ...
  "type": "Announce"
}

ID indicates that activity has originated on my server, but this is not possible

@silverpill @julian Searching for the URL should give you what that URL represents. If you want the post, search for the URL of the post specifically.

@julian @silverpill We could define a dedicated type for Thread or Conversation or whatever you want to call "a Collection that contains only "post" objects", but it would still be a Collection as well. I think this was something I was considering for a FEP that I ended up never really writing because it felt unnecessary and also very premature. The general idea is to define some way to know what a Collection "contains" -- is it a Conversation or a MediaAlbum or whatever. The problem is taxonomy

@julian @silverpill Really we need to take a step back and first define what a "post" object is. I'm tentatively leaning toward "any object that has content", but I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases I haven't accounted for that will pop up when thinking more deeply about the issue.

@trwnh @julian @silverpill Content types? Note, Article, Image, Video, Audio, Document? That should cover most Web content collections.

If you want to add an extension (Listicle, say) you could multi-type with the most appropriate Activity Vocabulary content type (`type`: ['buzz:Listicle', 'as:Article']`).

@trwnh @julian @silverpill

Jargon term, should define:

@julian @silverpill @trwnh So, what about returning the root object, like a `Note` or `Article`, with `replies` and `context` included?

@evan @julian @silverpill This goes back to a convo from yesterday about how to handle Activity types with content, which conceivably makes them "posts" in the sense of an "activity stream". ("John Created a Note" is a first-class item in much the same way "Sally Liked a Note" is also a first-class item in Facebook's activity feed, or "Alice Added 9 Images to a MediaAlbum" would be.)

If you put content on an Announce, then that Announce is ostensibly its own "post" in addition to being a share.