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Shoq

What prevents activityPub from implementing a “threaded conversation” post type? The visibility would be limited to ONLY people following a parent thread. Let a million conversations flourish, without even one of them flooding our follower’s timelines with our engagements about many interests.

@shoq You might like the way the Phanpy client shows threads/conversations. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but it does prevent replies from just randomly showing up in your timeline out of order and out of context. phanpy.social

phanpy.socialPhanpyMinimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client

@shoq I believe threaded conversations are possible in the AP protocol. It's down to the implementation as to how they are represented.

@shoq, as @mikey alluded to, this is already present in ActivityPub via the `context` property.

w3.org/TR/activitystreams-voca

But broader discussion exists re: Eugen, et al. and their vision for #Mastodon is. He's said even recently that the whole idea of small communities is antithetical to the aims of Mastodon, this was why he didn't think calling individual Mastodon servers as "communities" was appropriate.

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www.w3.orgActivity Vocabulary

Which is his right as the #BDFL of the Mastodon project. How he decides to steer the ship is what happens at the end of the day.

However, niche communities have been around for ages before the advent of microblogging and blasting your every throught into the ether/#fediverse. Forums (like @nodebb@fossotodon.org!) have been doing this since the internet was invented, and in many ways, a hierarchical listing of topics makes a lot more sense than a firehose of individual thoughts.

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So yeah, even if Eugen isn't planning to address it soon, if ever, do rest assured that there are up-and-coming implementors who will definitely take a closer look at resolving this particular Mastodonian pain point.

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One thought experiment I had was how I would expose #fediverse content outside of a hierarchical category/forum listing. It doesn't make sense to introduce a feed just because Mastodon does it, so we might end up doing a pseudo-category view where reply chains are automatically collapsed into topics.

... and if we're doing that, then yes! Automatically, you won't see an entire set of disjointed thoughts sorted by recency, with absolutely no context whatsoever.

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@shoq @mikey For reference, here was @Gargron talking about what I mentioned up-thread ⬇️

mastodon.social/@Gargron/11162

5/4 (oops!)

@shoq This is a different product. @ivory - or a diff client - could institute something like this (as a mode) but Mastodon is built on the idea that followers see each/every post people do.