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julian
julian
@julian@activitypub.space  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

⁂ Article

Deleting a post vs deleting an entire comment tree

For context:

  • Two big threadiverse implementors (and probably mbin) currently federate Announce(Delete(Object)) for deletion of content — all synchronized communities follow suit and delete the content as well.
  • If that object is the root-level node, and it is deleted, everything below it is also deleted.
  • Lemmy and Piefed are investigating the possibility of changing this behaviour so that the action deletes the object itself only, and the reply tree stays.

For context:

  • Two big threadiverse implementors (and probably mbin) currently federate Announce(Delete(Object)) for deletion of content — all synchronized communities follow suit and delete the content as well.
  • If that object is the root-level node, and it is deleted, everything below it is also deleted.
  • Lemmy and Piefed are investigating the possibility of changing this behaviour so that the action deletes the object itself only, and the reply tree stays.

We're in the middle of discussing how best to communicate this. With Delete(Object) behaviour shifting to deleting the single object only, there are two options to delete the entire tree/thread:

  1. Delete(Object) with a new property with_replies or similar
  2. Remove(Context), where Context is a new url that refers to the entire tree

Thoughts? We're discussing this tomorrow at ForumWG but it'd be nice to get some eyes on it beforehand.

cc @rimu@piefed.social @nutomic@lemmy.ml @melroy@kbin.melroy.org @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de

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@trwnh@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

@julian @rimu @nutomic @melroy @BentiGorlich is this a problem? it seems to only be a problem if you require the others to behave exactly as you do. the same "issue" applies to any activity in general. say you send a Delete; the others can do what they want:
- purge all children
- orphan all backlinked objects
- replace with a tombstone
- rewrite content to say "this post is deleted"
- ignore your activity as unauthorized or invalid or spam

the intent could be clearer...

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@trwnh@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

@julian @rimu @nutomic @melroy @BentiGorlich the complicating factor here is not what other people do, but that you would be using the terms incorrectly or imprecisely according to their definition. this happens all the time in natural language where people sometimes use words they don't fully understand or use them with definitions not matching consensus. it's how we get people saying "literally" for things that are not literal, and other such slang.

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silverpill
silverpill
@silverpill@mitra.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

@julian This sounds like an implementation detail to me. Some fedi platforms delete a child object when its parent is deleted, others don't.

If you want to make the removal of a subtree explicit, I'd recommend a Remove where object is an array (similar to what @mariusor suggested):

Remove(object: Note[], target: Context)

This also helps with migrating away from Announce(Delete). I saw your FEP draft, will provide more feedback once I read it in full.

@rimu @nutomic @melroy @BentiGorlich

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