mikedev

I think a couple of folks have mentioned trying to consolidate both of these approaches into one. I once used something that resembled 1b12 (long before there was a "threadiverse"), but as I recall it didn't really work well with private groups and aspects/circles - where you're often dealing with third-party permissions. You can only relay public activities to third parties via an Announce, and so conversations with restricted audiences don't work out very well for viewers on Mastodon. The third party does not have permission to access the activity from its author, only from the conversation owner. Once you've run into this issue, you are likely to more fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches. Container operations are pure relays and work correctly with third-party access control, assuming you're using signed objects (which everybody should be using, but that's a hill to die on another day).

True, but fetch one collection and you've got it all. Might be paged, and with Mastodon that means another fetch for every ten activities (seriously?), but those are just implementation details.

We're using both here. There's an icon to let you know that you're looking at an actual conversation -- vs. a collection of microblog posts that once had a common ancestor.

The differences in signal/noise ratios between the two styles are quite dramatic. Neither is better or worse than the other. They are different. And they can both co-exist.

Also, conversation containers has the ability to "reply to all" as well as "reply to sender". Microblogs don't have this concept, and instead "reply to all" means "send to all your followers, instead of a reply directed to the actual conversation audience.

Additionally, consumers are also able to query the context owner for an index without needing to crawl the entire reply tree.

While this is certainly true, when conversation containers are working correctly, you never need to backfill a conversation. It is all delivered to you.

We accept punycode usernames and render appropriately; or pass through UTF-8 usernames. The biggest issue is autocomplete; so we provided that using aliases/petnames for connections. Probably will have issues on some platforms.

Might want to use a custom taxonomy/tag type for cross-posts. That's what we use for saving messages in "folders". While we don't typically federate these, I would imagine you might want to share those tags with software that supports cross-posting.