Idea: Annotations / Labeling of content

[ThisIsMissEm]

• self-labeling of content
• moderator-labeling of content
• annotations vs hashtag-style labels
• having followable actors that apply labels to content (this is very likely annotations, not labels)
• standardised vocabularies of labels, e.g., DTSP

Potentially building off the Web Annotations Data Model

Needs to figure out the different use cases and the different mechanisms that would be necessary.

[ThisIsMissEm]

Original discussion about a community notes alternative is here: w3c/activitypub#464

[gobengo]

Potentially building off the Web Annotations Data Model

Yes! Instead of just trying to categorize/moderate whole social posts, it would be great to empower mods to annotate the exact parts of contents that fit various classifications. This would make for better training data for auto classification. More importantly, UIs and processes built around this could more easily help educate community participants on acceptable policy-based norms, which in some online community research shows is super important iirc from some old research from https://coralproject.net/research/

We've been using WADM's TextQuoteSelector in the activitypub-behaviors dataset of requirements and other non-required behaviors to describe the origin of each requirement from the spec itself.

I don't necessarily disagree that annotations of specific parts are useful, it seems like this can be added later as a refinement of annotating a post.

If annotations are considered a list of objects, which each contain an author and e.g. an item from a vocabulary such as discussed in #15, then adding additional keys to refer to text parts or media parts as in #16 would be an easy upgrade.

I mention this mostly because I'm pretty sure a lot could already be achieved with the simpler solution. It would be sad to see a lack of progress due to waiting for something more complete.

At least, I do not currently see how it would be necessary to wait.

[bobwyman]

I strongly support the incorporation of annotations into the AS/AP data model. Ideally, any AP actor would be able to create an object which is an AnnotationOf any other object. In many instances, publishing such an object would have similar side-effects as publishing something InReplyTo something. (i.e. there would be annotation collections on objects, actors would have collections of annotations, etc.)

It should be understood that an Annotation is NOT a reply, rather it is a statement about some object rather than a response to its creator.

[ShadowJonathan]

Apologies for the non-technical approach, but I think that this - having user-attached labels/annotations/freeform string fields - would be very good for the culture mix of the fediverse, as this will allow many many (currently public) disputes, announcements, and other approaches of "pointing" to users (either positive or negative) to happen with more direct and subtle input from the originator. And, the fact that the receiving user needs to explicitly agree/follow the originating labeller/annotator will make the relationship more direct, instead of publications circulating, and losing context due to context collapse.

There has been a pervasive problem of burnout, both due to boy-crying-wolf and overload of these kinds of posts, people losing fedi entirely over it, or starting to get traumatic responses, as this is often then the topic of the week, and extremely emotionally exhausting for everyone involved.

Annotations would allow the tension of these "earth quake" moments to be more gradually addressed, socially, and while I can argue that putting scuttlebutt in more private/deeper corners can have negative effects, I believe that the (unintentional) experiment of public "fedi meta" discourse over the last couple of years have proven that the public route consolidates exhaustion and energy demand as much as it does its information.

In short, I think that this would be a good addition to resolve many such social cases, in a way that would be less energy-intensive, especially for bystanders, who need not be aware of this without their consent. Some users just wanna vibe.

[ThisIsMissEm]

Statement from @gobengo on the public-swicg mailing list:

tl;dr: You can already do web annotation via ActivityPub by sending objects like {"type":"Annotation","@context":"http://www.w3.org/ns/anno.jsonld"} to your ActivityPub outbox via HTTP POST.

sadly there are too many 'ActivityPub Implementations' that are not "ActivityPub Conformant Servers" and do not even try to implement the 'object creation' requirements of ActivityPub.
But if they haven't implemented the already-standard way of creating annotations, we shouldn't make more new alternatives, we should encourage folks to do what has been standardized for 5+ years.

imho there is no need for an Annotate activity.

You can already POST an Annotation to an ActivityPub outbox. The ActivityPub outbox MUST accept it and then MUST wrap it in a Create activity.

It's not an accident that, other than a small media type parameter, this is exactly how W3C's Web Annotation Protocol says to create an annotation in a collection.

We don't need an activity for every kind of thing, e.g. 'Annotate'. There are other vocabularies for things, e.g. the Web Annotation Data Model and w3c protocols for it. ActivityPub already provides activities to describe the lifecycle of things, and requirements that an outbox server wrap unexpected things in a Create activity to start logging those lifecycle events.

New vocabulary and behaviors are not at all necessary, and will only fragment efforts even more.

The Web Annotation Data Model is already sufficient to be used as the request body of the already-standard mechanism in ActivityPub to create things: just POST it to your ActivityPub outbox (which MUST wrap it in 'Create' if its not an Activity).

It would be very confusing if, in addition to the already standard {type:'Create',object:{type:'Annotation'}}, there were a bunch of {type:'Annotate',object:{type:'Note'}}.

This is a good time to remember that there is nothing in ActivityPub that requires that oubox submission type be defined by AS2
and that {} is a valid AS2/AP object.

[ShadowJonathan]

So, practically, what would this mean for an implementation like Mastodon?

Use Annotation, and send it via Create objects to remote inboxes?

Can/should it then fetch existing annotations via /outbox, or a collection, when it first starts subscribing to a moderation list/auditor?

[ThisIsMissEm]

Let's focus first on how we'd want to support annotations, since there's many different approaches here.

[npdoty]

Is a separate Annotation type needed for any of institutional fact-checking, community-note context additions, or clarifications/corrections? Those seem like they all might be replies to a post that are intended to have a broad audience including those who have received or come across the original post.

Decentralized services won't have the luxury of declaring who the annotators/fact-checkers are, and it might be harder to construct a voted community consensus on a community note. But it might also be beneficial to recognize up front that different people will recognize different sources of fact checking and context addition. Maybe they can do that by having instances recommend (or people share lists) of accounts to subscribe to that only distribute fact-check follow-up-type response posts.