And why must I create a new ‘article’ to make a thread and not a post - which I think makes a new microblog.
I’m coming from a Mastodon POV, I run my own instance and have a pretty good idea (I think) about how federation works. The way ActivityPub is used is close enough to be familiar but also… not; very uncanny valley.
Additionally, if upvotes are favourites, what are downvotes? and how are they federated?
Yes and no. Again, there seems to be some precautions in place to prevent boosted comments or posts from being rendered as duplicates here, and I don’t think it’s pushing anything to the top of any of the sorted feeds (though maybe it gets counted as an upvote as well? I’m not sure). It just re-sends it anyone following the booster. And then the group re-sends it to everyone following the group.
This is actually really easy to see on Mastodon, since Mastodon doesn’t handle groups differently from any other actor. Groups on Mastodon appear just as another user, and you interact with the group by @-ing it. You subscribe to a group by following the group actor, and the group actor will boost any messages it receives. You can create a new thread by @-ing the group in a top level post, or you can reply to a post by replying to a top-level post boosted by the group actor.
And the the group actor boosts it right back at you.
Thank you, this makes sense! I mean, it also makes me think this becomes exceptionally noisy as the boosts may grow at a low exponential rate as the number of users expands, but I will watch it and see how it works here :)
It is noisy, but it’s also the only way to really make sure content propagates content the network.