fep

FEP-400e: Publicly-appendable ActivityPub collections

Summary

In social media, it’s a frequent pattern when there’s a collection owned by someone that other people can contribute to. Examples include:

Currently, there is no generic way to signify that an object was created as part of a collection and should only be considered in its context.

This proposal describes how ActivityPub servers and clients could specify collections to which objects created by their actors belong.

Requirements

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this specification are to be interpreted as described in [RFC-2119].

Publicly-appendable collections

A publicly-appendable collection is any collection where it is expected that someone other than its owner could add items but over which its owner retains complete authority. For example, a wall is a collection to which other people could add posts (Notes), but from which its owner could delete any posts as well as restrict who can add them.

A publicly-appendable collection SHOULD have a valid and globally-unique id that SHOULD point to either a Collection or an OrderedCollection object that contains the links to all its objects.

Specifying collections in actors

If an actor has publicly-appendable collections, its server MAY include them as additional fields in its ActivityPub representation. For example, user actors may specify the link to their walls, or groups may specify the link to the collection of their photo albums.

Implementations MAY use the presence or absence of specific collection to determine whether the actor’s server supports features that depend on that collection and alter their UIs accordingly.

Using target in objects

If an ActivityPub object is being created as part of a collection, the object SHOULD include the target field that contains an abbreviated collection object, which SHOULD contain at least the following fields:

Discussion

While [Activity Vocabulary] specifies target as a field with similar semantics in activities, it’s important to include it in objects themselves so any software that only sees the object without its enclosing Create activity, e.g. when following a link form another object or retrieving the object from a user-provided URI, unambiguously knows that it should only be considered in the context of its collection.

Adding an object to a collection

When an ActivityPub server receives in its inbox a correctly signed Create activity with an object that has the target field, it does the following:

Receiving an Add activity

When an ActivityPub server receives in its inbox a correctly signed Add activity, it SHOULD do the following:

Example of an Add activity

{
  "@context":"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "actor":"https://example.com/users/1",
  "id":"https://example.com/posts/41864/activityAdd",
  "to":[
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public",
    "https://example.com/users/1/followers",
    "https://example.com/users/6946"
  ],
  "type":"Add",
  "object":"https://example.com/posts/41864",
  "target":"https://example.com/users/1/wall"
}

Deleting an object from a collection

Since the collection owner has complete authority over the contents of the collection, they can delete any objects from it. When an object is deleted from a collection by its owner, their server SHOULD send a Delete activity to at least the server of the actor that created the object; it’s also RECOMMENDED that this activity is sent to all the servers that Add was sent to. Those servers then SHOULD delete the object as if the deletion was initiated by its creator.

Moving an object between collections

In some use cases, it might make sense to allow objects to be moved between collections, for example, a group moderator might want to move a photo between photo albums in a group, or a forum moderator might want to split some messages into a separate thread. It’s only possible to move objects between collections that are owned by the same actor.

When moving an object between collections, the collection owner SHOULD send a Move activity to at least the server of the object creator, specifying the target collection and the id of the object; it’s also RECOMMENDED that this activity is sent to all the servers that Add was sent to. Those servers then SHOULD update the target field in their stored copies of the object.

Security considerations

The requirement of an Add activity sent by a collection owner largely prevents a bad actor from effectively adding something to a collection against the collection owner’s will while also helping data consistency across servers. However, there’s still one case when this is possible. When a server fetches an object that has a target field directly, for example when a user has entered its URL into a search box or when it is referenced by a field such as inReplyTo, there’s presently no reliable way to verify whether the object actually belongs to the collection.

Implementations

This proposal is implemented in Smithereen for both user and group walls since the following commit: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen/commit/de013593dde06a3091ecfbd32960a694d79c146e

References

CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication

To the extent possible under law, the authors of this Fediverse Enhancement Proposal have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

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