@trwnh @thisismissem @pfefferle @hongminhee @julian @renchap @mike @michael but one thing I'd note: I think objects should always degrade gracefully into something note like, but that's not the case for activities

Imagine I used a federated last.fm like application. If Mastodon converted as:Listen to a note, my followers would probably get pissed off about the "Now listening to: X" statuses every 2 minutes

@erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap

i think this is on the user/client to not publish/deliver every single scrobble to all followers. mastodon should still be able to render arbitrary activities if there is a text repr of them.

@erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap

this is like saying “i’m going to email every scrobble to my entire contact address-book and it’s their job to filter out such emails”

@trwnh @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap we don't really have a way of knowing what activities our followers are interested. In fact in the general case that's impossible; if I started using a music suggestion system based upon my friends listening habits today, I'd like to be able to use their historic listening data that they have been broadcasting to seed it.

Alternatively, consider that I decide to make my listening history public and it hits a relay. My as:Listen activities are going to absolutely carpet bomb the federated timeline.

Aside from the Annointed Two (Create, Announce) we really need to treat most activities as ephemeral and largely unimportant

@erincandescent @julian @mike @hongminhee @thisismissem @pfefferle @michael @renchap

This is why we need to allow people to specifically follow certain Collections which are exposed as streams. It’s also why we need to allow people to send activities to arbitrary audiences which might not include all followers.

If a relay is set up for the purpose of aggregating Listen activities and you follow it, that’s on you. You asked for it.

Create is the exception, not the rule

@trwnh @erincandescent fwiw I'm 100% on board for following Collections exposed as streams. It seems to me the reasonable solution to the as:Listen-spamming issue here. If you subscribed explicitly to get as:Listen then it is completely reasonable to expect your client to know how to handle it in a way that is not annoying to the end user

@darius @erincandescent It’s all just email subscriptions in my head, lol. Like in Github you can choose to be notified of comments, forks, etc. as you please. If LastFM added support for email notifications any time a friend scrobbled anything, and you subbed to that, well… hey, it’s your inbox, right?

@trwnh @darius I think personally I lean towards a pure firehose model. Send me everything you got and let my clients pull out the data they're interested in

In part because we're unlikely to ever agree on one exact axis of filtering

@erincandescent @darius @trwnh the fediverse in general could benefit from thinner servers and thicker clients, it would make all these interop discussions so much easier

@laurenshof @darius @trwnh ... Things I have been shouting for literally a decade!

@erincandescent @darius @trwnh right, yeah, i meant this as a i'm-shouting-with-you-in-agreement-post