Re: How to retrieve conversation parents?

On 12-09-14 04:58 AM, Mikael Nordfeldth wrote:
> Using StatusNet as a federated service I have on several occasions 
> seen partial conversations where users I subscribe to are discussing 
> things users whose posts haven't reached the instance I am on.
>
> I am curious how this should best be solved within the scope of 
> OStatus. The element thr:in-reply-to is of course an important part of 
> this, but I see no obvious way to actually fetch the contents of its 
> referenced post. The in-reply-to ID is not necessarily a URL either, 
> so fetching it straight-up with HTTP[S] is not a reliable solution.
>
> SHOULD an OStatus PuSH feed specify an API end-point where one can 
> retrieve posts by atom:id, for example the one in thr:in-reply-to?
>
> Or have I missed something in the specification that solves this?
Nothing in the spec solves this.

I think there might be a way to do it using Atom's "replies" link.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685#section-4

A recipient of an activity that has a replies link could subscribe to 
that link using PuSH, and then receive all the replies.

There are a couple of problems with this:

 1. It results in a high number of PuSH subscriptions.
 2. It means all nodes participating in a conversation need to send
    replies to a single feed.

That said, I think it's the best way to go forward.

-Evan