Conversation
Notices
-
As the fediverse grows, broken conversations are becoming a bigger issue on smaller !gnusocial node.
- Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) repeated this.
-
This is a good thing. We did not evolve to be all inclusive.
-
@zoowar Yes, agreed. So, I'm imagining a button beside the thread that reconstructs by pulling data from the other servers.
-
We seem to be on different pages. Fragmented conversation is a good thing. Pseudo centralized (reddit style) conversation is a bad thing.
-
@zoowar The fragmented conversation is a cause of a serious design problem of the OStatus protocol. Other protocols (like the one from Diaspora or Friendica) have demonstrated that you can combine decentrality and completeness of the communication.
There really is no benefit in the incompleteness for the decentrality. In fact it supports the centrality, because only on larger servers you have a mostly complete communication.
-
I expect you are mistaken as I highly doubt that diaspora and friendica distribute "complete" conversation to all participant hosts (i.e. each host has a copy of the complete conversation tree in the node's database). More likely they construct conversation based on "root reply iteration" in which they treat each reply to a root message as a root and fetch replies to it, then rinse and repeat iteratively on the replies, caching the results. Maybe @mike@loadaverage.org can comment on how friendica handles conversation construction.
-
@zoowar Friendica and Diaspora are working similar: When you comment to a thread then you don't send your comment to your own followers (like OStatus is doing) but to the thread owner (the thread starter). Then the thread owner is relaying your comment to his followers. By using a signature mechanism the protocol ensures that the comment can't be changed while relaying it.
On OStatus is is different: There you send your comment to your own followers. Which means that it could happen that the thread owner doesn't even get your comment because you are commenting to a comment and not to the starting post.
I don't really like this.
-
Friendica, Diaspora, and Hubzilla all use a similar mechanism where comments are sent upstream (analagous to the intent of the salmon protocol) to the conversation root and then redistributed downstream to all the original participants. The end result is that all of the original participants (or recipients of the original top level post) receive a complete copy of the entire conversation. GNU-social uses a slightly different distribution model where there is no distinction made between upstream and downstream distribution. As a result the conversation distribution can vary depending on the relationships of the nodes involved.
-
When I had a personal GNUsocial node, I was missing a lot of convo. Though I could click on (in context) to see it all, third-party clients like AndStatus cannot do that without the help of external browser. It's not ideal.
-
On the other hand, I like the idea of nodes users being a proxy for which other nodes are "trusted" to pull notices from. Either way, I think a sort of "promiscuous" option where a node automatically or selectively pulls all the notices it can find in a context would be beneficial.
-
@ericxdu23 @tuttle Yes. It would be nice to be able to "follow" a conversation. #W3CSocial are talking about how to make that happen.
tuttle
zoowar
heluecht
mike
Eric Duhamel
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)
All Chirp! content and data are available under the