Re: Proposal ideas for Activity Streams 3 Standard

> NNTP-like conversations, which aren't really supported today by
ActivityPub since ActivityPub roots all "threads" on individuals, while
NNTP divides the conversation space by subject.

i'm not entirely familiar with NNTP, but you could model conversations
using the `context` property. it is "intentionally vague", but there is
FEP-7888 trying to make it less vague. there is nothing inherent to AS2/AP
that says we have to construct conversations using `inReplyTo` chains; in
fact, it makes far more sense to treat the reply chain as a separate
metadata structure and use `context` for logically grouping things into...
well, contexts.

> Given that we've learned a lot about conversation styles over the last
several decades, it would be useful to build up an ontology for those
styles, to describe each of them, and determine what, if any particular
protocol support is required to support each of them. (This might be a fun
project for some academic looking for paper ideas...)

this is something i've been developing theoretically for a while: the
different paradigms of communication, and trying to map protocols onto
them. i'm currently of the view that we have:

- publishing, in which you make a resource available to an audience
- discussing, in which some forum exists for various topics
- messaging, in which you chat with people directly
- reading, in which you aggregate and view all of the above

it's possible to collapse these into one application domain, of course,
although distinction helps. crucially, the idea of context is applicable to
all of these. if you have a context, then that can equally represent some
forum topic, social media thread, chat room, you name it. you can publish
into a context. you can discuss within a context. you can even message a
context, if you make it an actor. and when reading, you can choose to view
the full context instead of just the object. really, the underlying data
model is the same -- objects in collections, but the collections may be
explicitly managed or implicitly created or reconstructed by actors based
on what they can see.

practically speaking, however, almost no one has implemented context like
so or even at all. either it goes unused, or it gets used as an
unresolvable tag that only loosely indicates which thread might contain the
reply-chain you want to attach it to (since you can't resolve it
individually). this is a shame, imo; if we had a concept of a context, we
could use it to represent a conversation, and then perhaps someone can own
or moderate that conversation, opening the door to what would otherwise be
"reply controls" but should more correctly be a "moderated conversation".
the wonderful thing is, you can present this however you want! you could
present the context as a chat room, or a comments section, or a forum
topic, or maybe even some new thing. FEP-7888 again tries to describe some
of these.

> the social sharing of bookmarks does present a problem requiring
standardization and would be a proper focus of this group.

could this not be done with Add Link to Collection, where some "bookmarks
collection" has an audience? actually, i am of the opinion that a lot of
these problems are not entirely difficult to solve, but rather they are
difficult to agree on how to solve them in the same way. after all, mamy
languages allow for multiple equivalent sentence structures, and the
activitystreams vocabulary is no exception, since it's modeled on english
SVO(T).