There have been monthly meetings about this issue and surrounding ones that are open to the public if you really want to know more. There are years worth of discussions about it too but they are very spread around
Comment on Our fediverse conversations are gonna have the context they have been missing!
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
For some reason I assumed this was already how the fediverse worked, but I haven’t been here very long and it does explain some things, including the “empty” vibe in some lesser-populated places.
Naturally, I have questions. What consideration is being given to data integrity/mutability and trust? Will all servers that touch a post have a distributed record of all comments and give network confirmation (a la blockchain)? Or does one server (e.g. the originator of each post, or the server with the most resources) act as a single authority of that post? Something else?
Could one server be instructed to “go rogue” and submit bad content to the network, or go on a deletion spree that ends up becoming permanent?
What about resources? What impact will backfilling have on your average dude hosting a small instance?
This is just where my mind goes, you see. I’m sure all this and more have been discussed and figured out already. If a public discussion is available to look at, I would love a link!
julian@activitypub.space 1 week ago
Those are all very good questions, and exactly the sort of things that would be discussed at the ForumWG.
Backfill is just one of the things (the main thing, currently) we touch on, but one of the more important ones, because the potential to ensure you have the entire conversation is important from a data completeness standpoint.
The thing to remember is that there's no one "owner" of a conversation. Right now it's a pretty loose association... individual posts and notes can declare that they are part of a context, even if that isn't the case. This beats the current system where there is no association at all.
The difference here is that as a consumer of backfill, I can actually go to the context and verify this. We can extend this later on with context ownership, and defer responsibilities like moderation, interaction policies, forking/merging, etc.
The long view of this is we intend to increasingly solidify the association between context and object over time.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Very cool, thanks for your response!