There have been some scattered discussions I've seen over the past year that mention that
@pfefferle@mastodon.social's WordPress ActivityPub plugin federates their blog posts out as an
as:Note, and that the only reason this is done is because Mastodon only treats
as:Note (and
as:Question) as a first-class object and relegates anything else to a fallback handler that takes a short snippet of the content, and shows a link back to the original source, thus losing any in-app benefits (boosts, replies, etc.)
Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know. So that's why I'd like to ask Mattias — or anybody else with some context — here.
For reference:
- as:Article: Represents any kind of multi-paragraph written work.
- as:Note: Represents a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length.
- as:Page: Represents a Web Page.
I have also noticed that Lemmy, perhaps out of principle, sends out an
as:Page for new generated content, and only the
replies federate out as
as:Note. It has unfortunately led to some assertions that Lemmy's federation is "broken", even though it is arguably
not the case.
@nutomic@socialhub.activitypub.rocks, care to weigh in?
I don't even blame Mattias for opting to send everything out as
as:Note.
End of the day
right now it doesn't matter how Mattias or Nutomic represent their higher-level collection of data, because Mastodon is the largest implementor and neither they —
nor anyone else I know of, for that matter — treat anything that's
not as:Note or
as:Question specially.
But that ought to change. The question is
how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.
What's important to me right now is what the landscape looks like right now, and why that is the case.
N.B. The discussion here will eventually make its way to online real-time discussion at one of the future WG meetings.
