Re: a user liking a post

Hi Melvin,

Giving the *like *itself a URI makes it possible to to attach other
metadata to the *like* itself (eg. a published date), as well as have the
possibility to interact with a like further, eg. by liking or replying to
it.

Indiewebbers have converged on *like* posts, which translate to:

<http://example.org/2015/08/like-post> _:like-of <
http://example.com/2015/07/something-likeable> .

(*like-of* being an experimental mf2 property).

Where the relationship is between the two posts, and it is implicit that
the author of </like-post> likes </something-likeable>.

In AS2 the same thing is achieved using a Like Activitiy, ie.

<http://example.org/2015/08/like-post> a as:Like .
<http://example.org/2015/08/like-post> as:object <
http://example.com/2015/07/something-likeable> .

These are basically the same aside from the *like *semantics being in the
type in AS2 and in the property in mf2. The result is still a first class
object with its own URI that one can add additional data to, and interact
with.

In addition, this means the *like *can be created in the likers own
dataspace, rather than needing to update the likee directly. Upon the likee
server being notified of the like, their server can handle it as desired,
which could include..
- creating a direct relationship between <#me> and </something-likeable>
internally,
- incrementing </something-likeable>'s *likes* counter,
- or adding <#me> to a Collection of people who have liked
</something-likeable>,
if any of these makes querying etc. easier, but that becomes an
implementation detail.

Interestingly, I don't think any of the major centralised social networks
I've looked at have external URIs for likes, but I think it's a safe bet
they have internal ones and store data about the *like *happening. Twitter
doesn't even allow you to get a list of users who have favorited a tweet
through their API (though on an individual tweet there's a boolean
"favorited" property) and a quick search will reveal lots of developers
complaining about this inability..

Amy

On 23 August 2015 at 01:23, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I've noticed that the concept of a user liking a post is deployed in a
> number of systems.
>
> But it seems there are a number of ways of doing it.
>
> I just wanted to see if there are pros and cons of different approaches.
>
> Right now I do something like:
>
>   <#me> <http://ontologi.es/like#likes> <content>
>
> It seems simple, lightweight and meets my needs.
>
> Are people in general going to use AS2 for this, is there a good vocab to
> switch to?
>
> Thoughts appreciated ...
>