In #Activitypub, replies to a post are a collection of links that are part of the original post. So it’s only natural that the original poster should be in control of what’s in the reply collection. Technically it’s quite simple to implement that the OP (original poster) can decide which replies he/she/they accept or refuse in said collection. It’s up to the developers of ActivityPub implementers like Mastodon et al to make that level of control accessible.
@jwildeboer When the Social WG discussed about the protocol, I provided commentary. At that point in time, I already had worked with the Diaspora protocol and knew their way of distributing comments. I'm not totally sure anymore, but I can imagine that I suggested that to the WG as well.
But I guess that AP inherited their current behaviour from pump.io. Sadly also LD signatures didn't took of. So we would need a different method of authenticating especially non public posts.
@jwildeboer@evan I can remember to have added several other comments that where decided to leave this to the implementers. For example I suggested a definition for DMs.
@jwildeboer@evan Not really. In Friendica we can decide with each post who should receive it, so we always use to, cc or bcc. The only really usable way would be a special indicator (like the one that Pleroma introduced) or a dedicated endpoint. I know that there been discussions about these two possibilities - but there had been no decision about this.
@heluecht@jwildeboer you don't need signatures. Just fetch the replies collection. The OP can use 'Add' or 'Accept' activities to indicate that an object has been added to the replies.
@jwildeboer@evan Commenting person B can't know which accounts person A, who added the post, has as recipients, so if person C were to request the post from B, B couldn't know and would therefore deny access.
@jwildeboer@evan When A and B are followers of X and both are replying to X's post - but neither A nor B are following each other, how could A see B's post and vice versa?
@heluecht@evan I try to understand from the user perspective. I see a post by account X because person B commented on it. The post by X has a unique id so I can ask for the post and reply list. You are saying I would get neither when the post by X is non-public? Which should mean I shouldn’t see it in the first place when I’m not a follower of X, right?
@jwildeboer@evan Not every user exposes this collection. And also that doesn't take into account that you can define a different list of receivers for each post. And since you can use BCC, you couldn't even see all receivers in the original post.
@jwildeboer@evan This only works when all participants in a thread do have a got a list of all participants. But by now there isn't such a list, especially with the usage of BCC.
@jwildeboer@evan Since we can address our posts individually, a non public post in Friendica is normally directed to specific accounts. We are using the "litepub" extension to indicate a direct message.
@jwildeboer@evan It is handled in different locations. direct messages (at least how we define them) are messages that should be listed at a prominent place, while the other messages will simply be listed in the streams of messages that you might miss or not.