ActivityPub Plugin

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@Mte90

I think that there should be an option to allow to change the owner anyway otherwise doesn’t make sense that Discourse has the modal to change the owner.
Also to change it without send any updates to activitypub it is perfect for us.

I understand that folks want the ability to change post ownership. The issue to address in this respect is the one I outlined above, specifically this:

@angus

Changing post owners is a powerful administrative function, specific to Discourse, and implicitly tied to the “social contract” of a single instance.

The content appearing on your Discourse is from a service on which you are not an Administrator and which, but for ActivityPub, you would have no control over whatsoever. Simply extending the ability to change the author of that content without due consideration of that fact would not be prudent.

As for content authored by users from your Discourse in a topic that is published via ActivityPub, consider what should happen if any updates are made to the content once you’ve changed the post author. Do we:

1. stop publishing ActivityPub updates; or
2. publish them by the “old” Actor (user); or
3. publish them by the “new” Actor (user).

Publishing Update activities for an existing Object with a new Actor (i.e. 3) will work with Discourse (as I attempted to give affordance for this question), but it won’t work with other ActivityPub services. Indeed I have already pushed on this point, for this reason, in the ActivityPub ecosystem. See here:

Different activity and object "actors"

And I have an outstanding PR to Mastodon to make 3 possible

Allow status updates from other actors via ActivityPub

To give one example of just one of the problems here, consider the case in which you are publishing ActivityPub content with your account (and your name and picture) attached to it. One of your “competitors” follows your content. On their server they then change the ownership of all of the posts with your content to be posts by them (with their name and their picture) instead of posts by you. That may, somewhat understandably rub you the wrong way. Yes, of course this is possible with custom code anyway, but the question is whether you want to build that into the default affordances of the plugin.

Thinking about this overnight, one approach that might ameliorate this somewhat is if we added the publishing Actor to the ActivityPub status display:

I’m open to other ideas along those lines.

@Mte90

doesn’t make sense that Discourse has the modal to change the owner.

True, I think I’ll just remove the modal entirely on ActivityPub topics until we resolve the underlying question here.