Interesting!
The way I would suggest thinking about how ActivityPub works with both moderation and grouping (and other rubrics of online communication) is that it’s primarily a communication standard. It provides some mechanisms to handle those questions, but largely leaves them up to the various clients in the system.
Email as a communication standard is an imperfect, but perhaps useful, analogy. “Email” is collection of communication standards that allows you to exchange messages with anyone on the internet. It has various “quality control” issues, e.g. spam. There are some aspects of the collection of standards we call “email” that help to deal with those issues (e.g. DMARC, DKIM, SPF etc), however perhaps the primary way quality control is dealt with is in the email clients themselves. Gmail became a popular email client partly because it arguably dealt with spam (and similar quality control issues) quite well.
Following the analogy through Discourse would be the “Gmail” of ActivityPub. All of the moderation tools, user grouping and other features that make Discourse a great discussion platform are (pretty much) still available within the context of ActivityPub. I’ll flesh that out by starting to answer your questions.
I’ll start by describing what happens then we can perhaps move onto the more nuanced questions. I’m going to skip over a lot of things here, with a view to answering the basics:
-
Sally’s comment is published as an ActivityPub object from Wordpress.
-
The object is ingested into Discourse and converted into a post.
-
If Sally’s “Actor” is associated with a user account in Discourse the post will be associated with that user account. If her Actor is not already associated with a user account, a staged user will be created from Sally’s actor and they will own the post.
You can see the above at work in this topic:
-
The Discourse category WordPress - SocialHub is following Matthias’ Wordpress.
-
Matthias posted a new article on his blog using his regular wordpress account.
-
That appeared in Discourse as a new topic, with the post being associated with a staged user associated with Matthias’ Actor
-
The way comments work is exactly the same.
Just to cover perhaps the most obvious question: Can Matthias reconcile the “staged” user created from his Wordpress actor and his normal Discourse user on that server?
The short term answer is that the Discourse plugin has an “Authorization” feature set that currently lets you claim your ownership of actors from other Discourse servers or Mastodon servers which merges any such staged users into your account (meaning you now own the posts in your main Discourse account). That feature set could be extended to Wordpress. I appreciate this is a bit wordy, and it might be easier to understand what I mean with this demo:
The longer term answer is that identity proofs may be baked into ActivityPub activities at some point, perhaps removing the need for user-driven authorization, meaning the “reconciliation” could be (more) automatic.
Perhaps another question is whether “reconciliation” is necessary, given that Matthias still controls the identity attributes of his staged user via his ActivityPub Actor (which is editable on Wordpress, the edits of which filter through to the staged user on Discourse).
I say most of this as a form of throat clearing, so we can move onto your more nuanced, and important, questions. I hope I’m making sense so far.