Agenda Prep for April 2025 WG Meeting
from julian@community.nodebb.org to swicg-threadiverse-wg@community.nodebb.org on 02 Apr 14:52
https://community.nodebb.org/post/104083

Agenda preparation for the April ForumWG meeting can be found at this public link (anyone can make comments for review.)

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 3 April 2025.

We will be discussing:

#activitypub #forumwg #swicg #swicg-threadiverse-wg

threaded - newest

trwnh@socialhub.activitypub.rocks on 03 Apr 12:16 next collapse

Some notes for things I want to bring up regarding agenda items:

SIOC: Semantically Interlinked Online Communities as prior art

Predates ActivityPub, was submitted to the W3C, has evolved up until ~2018 in some form. Concepts that could be relevant for Forum TF work:

sioc:Item is directly associated with a sioc:Container, whereas as:Object is included in an indirect list of items within as:Collection

Containers vs Collections

For more on the difference between a Container and a Collection, see RDF Schema sections 5.1 and 5.2

A Container has open membership. There might always be more items in a container that are unknown:

<#Bag>  <#red_ball>.<#Bag>  <#green_ball>.<#Bag>  <#blue_ball>.# We do not know if the bag contains any other balls, such as a yellow ball.

A Collection can have closed membership. For example, Lists can be terminated with a nil element.

<#List> rdf:first <#A>.<#List> rdfs:rest rdf:nil.# We know that the list does not contain any more elements beyond A.

The way this is applied in SIOC is like so:

<#Item> sioc:has_container <#Container>.<#Container> sioc:container_of <#Item>.

The way this is applied in ActivityStreams is like so:

<#Collection> as:items (<#Item>).# There is no way to signal that the Item is part of the Collection, and it is not expected that collection items will expose links back to every single collection they are a part of.

sioc:UserAccount, sioc:Post, sioc:Thread, sioc:Forum, sioc:Site

  • A Post has_creator UserAccount.
  • A Post has_container which can be directly a Forum, or it can be something like a Thread (which can itself has_container of a Forum).
  • A Forum can has_parent of another Forum, if wishing to model subforums.
  • A Forum can has_space of a Space (like a desktop or file share), or in more concrete cases can has_host of a Site.
Mapping to AS2-Vocab?

If we roughly map this to AS2-Vocab we might get something like this:

@id: @type: [as:Person, sioc:UserAccount]@id: @type: [as:Person, sioc:UserAccount]@id: @type: [as:Note, sioc:Post]as:attributedTo: sioc:has_creator: as:content: "Hello"sioc:content: "Hello"as:context: sioc:has_container: @id: @type: [as:Collection, sioc:Thread] # caveat where as:Collection has spec issuesas:attributedTo: as:audience:  # maybe?sioc:has_container: sioc:container_of: @id: @type: [as:Group, sioc:Forum]as:attributedTo:  # i guess?sioc:has_moderator: sioc:has_host: @id: @type: [as:Service, sioc:Site] # idk about this onesioc:host_of:

Subtypes of forums and posts

From SIOC types module:

  • Forum: ArgumentativeDiscussion, ChatChannel, MailingList, MessageBoard, Weblog.
  • Post: BlogPost, BoardPost, Comment, InstantMessage, MailMessage, WikiArticle.

Protocol considerations

We probably want to separate eventually the idea of "i authored this" from "i have authority over this", especially if a forum "lives" somewhere on a host.

Comparison to NNTP / NetNews protocol / Usenet network

RFC 5536 defines an article format for sharing RFC 822/2822/5322 style Internet Messages with mandatory headers:

  • Date (as:published)
  • From (as:attributedTo)
  • Message-ID (@id)
  • Newsgroups (as:audience??)
  • Path (no analogue, represents the path taken as the article is shared across newsgroups? so an ordered list of where it was shared/reshared from?)
  • Subject (as:name or as:summary, but probably not required for AP Forum TF)

RFC 5537 describes architecture for distrib

julian@community.nodebb.org on 03 Apr 17:02 collapse

A note that the ForumWG meeting is scheduled to begin shortly: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg