Clarify use of context

[bashrc2]

The current practice appears to be to use both "conversation" (inherrited from OStatus) and "context" (without the @) to group posts together into a thread. I think this should be clarified within the specifification.

[akuckartz]

@bashrc2 Can you please provide examples?

Maybe a note can be added. But conformance to OStatus is not necessarily implied by conforming to the ActivityPub standard.

[nightpool]

conversation is entirely for old systems that upgraded from OStatus, it shouldn't be used for new implementations. It was used by Mastodon as part of the OStatus -> ActivityPub transition, and has no meaning for systems not upgrading from OStatus.

[bumblefudge]

@evanp would it make sense to have a "legacy compat" or "things you might see out in the wild" section of the primer? entirely non-normative of course but just useful for capturing these kinda footguns?

[bumblefudge]

sidenote: OStatus was discussed a lot in the spec-drafting era and it doesn't seem like OStatus conformance was super well-documented or supported by a uniform conformance toolset at the time, if the minutes are accurate: https://www.w3.org/wiki/index.php?search=ostatus&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go this might be why legacy support was kind of adhoc in systems making the transition and not mentioned in the spec itself?

[evanp]

We should have a Primer page on using context for conversations. I'll add it at https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub/Primer/conversations .