I wonder why a social protocol like #ActivityPub did not include a richer representation of relationships? The `Follow` activity is basically a subscribe to a message stream. It feels to me more like a technical feature than a social feature. I may want to share different information with family, close friends, and colleagues than with an actor that simply publishes updates, such as a news service or software project. 🤔
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@tofeo Content distribution group don't model social relationships per se but I agree they can be used for some of the same purposes. ActivityPub implies there might be other recipient groups besides "followers" but gives no guidance related to custom distribution collections. There are other potential uses of social relationships, such as timeline filters, notification controls, or defining relationship-based data access authorizations.
Use two different accounts?
Maybe?
Calculating what to share on a sliding scale about a hundred people sounds like we're tempting an "omg no" tsunami event.
The exponential complexity when the goal is simple safety, suggests other solutions may be better.
When you create an activity you don't have to send it to your followers. In fact "followers" is a special stream as you said that is driven by others but you can have your own stream. A spec-respecting server should allow you to create a Friends Collection, which doesn't contain all your followers but only those you control by hand, and use that in the to so that only actors there receive your activity. You may even select your targets and put them one by one, direct message style.
But doing that would mean respecting the spec and I have no idea which servers do, if any. Mastodon certainly doesn't. I fear the real problem is that all implementations tend to follow the mastodon style of "I do what I want" rather than following the spec
@rakoo I agree about the custom distribution collections, in theory, but it not part of the spec (other than a sentence or two related to delivery).
@Steve_Bate I wasn't there for the original authoring but I think specifying rich relationships is extremely opinionated and should probably be left to extensions rather than codified in the protocol. I personally don't even like that "Like" is in AP (not that I'm pushing to remove it; I'm trying to stay relatively neutral as WG Chair)
@darius I'm interested in your opinion what ActivityPub should have included or not (left to extensions), but that's a different discussion. 😉
This has been my argument for a long time when advocating "Community has no boundary" which ultimately boiled down to having rich relationships in the social graph. For protosocial I intend to indeed use Follow in a low-level pubsub mechanism, as a protocol capability.
@Steve_Bate Like ‘circles’ in Google+? I liked that idea but it didn’t really seem to catch on. (And nor did Google+ generally.)
@OpinionatedGeek Why not? Was the problem with representing social relationships or something else?
@Steve_Bate People weren’t familiar with the concept and I guess it wasn’t well explained, so most folks never bothered with it. Twitter was all the rage and they could mimic Twitter on Google+ by just ignoring circles and posting everything to public, so that’s what they generally did.
@Steve_Bate @OpinionatedGeek I absolutely loved Circles but my takeaway was that most people don't have a good mental model for it and can't really hold more than a few "circles" in their heads. Basically a power user feature, and Google is not a huge fan of supporting those. (This may have had more to do with the specific implementation of circles rather than their general concept.)
@Steve_Bate the Group entity was meant for this. The problem with #ActivityPub is that while defines entities and what they could mean, it doesn’t define compliance, so it pretty much means what Mastodon says it does (because of Mastodon’s dominance). As standards go, ActivityPub is very ineffective.
@bkoehn Do you have a reference for `Group` being meant for that? The AS2 Vocab definition is that it's just any collection of actors. Section 5.2 does discuss representing relationships although it's not mentioned in the ActivityPub rec.
@Steve_Bate Friendica or hubzilla had groups. You was able to add contact in a group and send a message only to a group only family only to a specific group.