Why did #ActivityPub create special behaviors such as Like, Announce and Block (and the Undo variants) instead of using Add to or Remove from the associated Collection objects?

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles because the activity isn't just about the change of the collection, but also notifying the other party our social intention. It could have required Like + Add, but that feels cumbersome and developers love side-effects.

@eyeinthesky my assumption for why there's multiple methods for achieving relatively similar results is that first the social vocabulary was created as a way to express the actions that the existing platforms already had enshrined, and then other operations, like collection management, were needed.

But as @thisismissem already said, the canonical social activities have specific side effects attached to their behaviour that extend to the entire social graph, and those are what ActivityPub actually codifies into its specification.

@thisismissem @smallcircles I know feelings will vary, but it doesn’t feel cumbersome to me. It seems more logically consistent and less functionally redundant. Side-effects can still be defined for specific target collections. What do you recommend for extension collection management?

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles yeah, there's those that like side-effects and those that dislike side-effects. Both are valid, AP just chose side effects.

I'm not sure I understand your question

@thisismissem @smallcircles If I define an extension that uses a collection, should I define a special activity for managing the collection instead of using Add/Remove?

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles you could, but you don't necessarily have to. Depends if adding to that collection has a social action besides the add I think.

Say I have a boops collection which contains actors I've booped. I could have a Boop activity with a side effect (because I want them to know I've booped them), or I could not, and just notify them that I added their Actor to this Collection.

@thisismissem @smallcircles The weird thing about Like+side_effects vs Add(Like activity to “likes collections”) is that the side effect is Add Like to “likes collection”. lol They are both one inbox activity.

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles that's the thing though! The likes collection doesn't contain activities, it contains objects.

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles and how do I infer social meaning from you adding an object to a collection? I could only do that if I was adding an activity to a collection

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles (funnily enough, in AT Protocol, we only have collections we add records to, all the social layer is defined by applications above, which receive all the changes to records and infer meaning from that)

@thisismissem @smallcircles I’m not sure how you define “social meaning”, but if you Add a Boop to my boops collection you socially booped me. I suppose a Boop activity is needed either way, but overloading the meaning to include implicit collection management seems dubious to me.

@thisismissem @smallcircles Per the AP spec… “The side effect of receiving this in an inbox is that the server SHOULD increment the object's count of likes by adding the received **activity** to the likes collection if this collection is present.” (emphasis mine)

@thisismissem @eyeinthesky

I just responded in the other thread about #ForgeFed way of dealing with Issues and PR's, emphasizing the actor model in the #ActivityPub specs.

Guess it depends on the nature of your extension and its desired functionality how you model things, but ForgeFed chose to have a dedicated actor, a TicketTracker, to manage the collection. Big advantage is that it become a truly encapsulated service with its own business logic, fronted by an AP actor for interoperable network communication.

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116096769625606025

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles yeah, and this is a side effect of the activity (e.g., Like) adding to both my likes collection and the likes collection on your post.

So would my add be targeting two collections with an Activity?

What about Announce? That's add to my outbox, add to my boosts collection, and add to your post's boost collection.

@eyeinthesky @smallcircles I suspect this is incorrect. I am pretty sure the likes collection contains only objects, not the activities.

@evan was there an erratum for this? I feel like there was?

@smallcircles @eyeinthesky yeah, making everything an Actor is certainly a choice, and you could do that

@thisismissem @smallcircles @evan It makes sense to me. Someone liked a local object. We wouldn’t add the liked object to the liked object “likes” collection (it would be the same object). It seems that only the activity (and collection count) is interesting. Maybe you are thinking about the “liked” collection? (Different topic, but it seems that this *should* be a collection of activities too. Dropping the activity loses info such as the Like timestamp.)

@thisismissem @eyeinthesky

I think we underrated the power of the actor model and the extent we can incorporate it on the #ActivityPub fediverse. Somehow we got eternally stuck in talking about HTTP plumbing and core protocol capabilities that we never fleshed out thoroughly in order to be able to just focus on the higher-level concerns of app and service modeling.

Actor systems based on loosely-coupled event-driven architecture, delegation, supervision, supervision strategies, inbox strategies, let-it-fail, actors fronting domain aggregates, service-orientation, etc.

@thisismissem @eyeinthesky

The biggest folly imho is this idea of "let's cram every domain into #ActivityStreams somehow". Flatten everything and project it onto this small set of social primitives that AS defines.

It is once more a choice of pragmatism: "Hey, I've seen it working with Mastodon, so I copied that. And #LinkedData extension mechanism is a handwaved horror show".

So understandable perhaps that we did it. But now we must overcome this trend which has taken stubborn root and drags the ecosystem down.

@silverpill@mitra.social add and remove feel more like building blocks than actual activities.

It would never capture the nuance of many of the activities that it would purportedly represent.