Post · bonfire.cafe

RE: https://event-federation.eu/2026/05/15/recurring-events-in-federation/

Events turned out to be a much harder problem then I've had imagined, especially if you go down the rabbit hole of related or recurring events. If writing a FEP I want to get it right.

There is this balance about being easy to implement easy to understand, yet being feature rich and allowing for different use cases.

And all this at best while encapsulating the (maybe) complex logic within a system and keeping the confusion away from users and federation. We'll see!

Karl Voit :emacs: :orgmode:

@publicvoit@graz.social · 2 hours ago

@linos I became a fan of making it as simple as possible to create recurring copies in contrast to a single recurring event.

This has many advantages and simplifies things.

Org-mode has this: https://karl-voit.at/2017/01/15/org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift/

André Menrath

@linos@graz.social · 2 hours ago

@publicvoit Spoiler: The tendency is indeed getting into the direction of not asking for any remote software in the Fediverse to parse RFC-5545 or https://schema.org/Schedule rules for event recurrence. But that shouldn't mean that rules are available, sometimes it's maybe nice to have an immediate hint like "this event happens every friday at 3pm, expect...".

The only way an occurrence can have a stable ID is via the ID of the event that defines the occurrence rules and the occurrence start date and time, best in utc and local time to take into account timezone changes, and maybe the sequence, .i.e. the revision number of the recurrence rule-set.

And now there comes RSVPs, i.e. the intent to be marked as a participant in an event. Here a problem was clearly visible, which is also true for non-recurring events: is a RSVP targeted towards just an event (so just its ID), or maybe further to a specific start time, or location, or even price offer, or more?

Schedule - Schema.org Type

Schema.org Type: Schedule - A schedule defines a repeating time period used to describe a regularly occurring Event. At a minimum a schedule will specify repeatFrequency which describes the interval between occurrences of the event. Additional information can be provided to specify the schedule more precisely. This includes identifying the day(s) of the week or month when the recurring event will take place, in addition to its start and end time. Schedules may also have start and end dates to indicate when they are active, e.g. to define a limited calendar of events.