akirk
[UX Question] Replies vs Comments
Linking this from a related discussion in the WordPress-ActivityPub repo, due to overlap of concerns: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/1422
The Issue
Replies and Mentions from the Fediverse are represented in two different ways when using Friends and ActivityPub-WordPress plugins together. ActivityPub-WordPress tends to represent replies to articles as Comments, but sometimes these instead get represented as a Friends Posts post type with the Friends plugin. When Enable Mastodon Apps gets thrown into the mix, it can make debugging quite challenging!
This actually makes it somewhat difficult to see where certain responses are being handled and stored. It also raises some questions as to whether there ought to be a single, standardized way for handling Fediverse interactions.
Other Considerations
Complicating things further, a number of different types of comments can get represented within social contexts as well. For example, our blog leverages WebMentions and PingBacks, and these can get treated as comments even though they are not social interactions or part of a conversation.
It may be worthwhile to think about whether there's a more unified way to handle mentions and replies for social interaction contexts. I will also open this issue up on the Friends repo as well.
From my perspective the only difference should be "out of the blue" replies. For those, the Friends plugin will create a "Friend Post", and depending on whether you follow them or not, as an "External" user. Everything that can be associated with a post is handled by ActivityPub and arrives as a comment. Is this the difference you are referring to?
Indeed, EMA in the mix makes things a bit more difficult because this needs to map these replies back into a pool of "everything is a status". It does this by means of a Comment post type so that those comments can reside in the same "id pool" as posts since many clients sort by id. If we'd mix posts and comments, then we might have id conflicts (since they potentially can have the same id), or that a new comment appears far down in a Mastodon client because it has a low comment id.
