I recently started thinking again about the Social knowledge fabrics discussion, and it seems to me that one of the biggest obstacles for fedi to become one is the following. The things we refer to as "threads" are actually "branches of a tree". You have a trunk, basically the whole fedi, each post is a branch, each branch can itself ramify into branches, but all the branches stay independent.
It would be useful if a discussion branch was not only shaped like a thread, but also had the usefulness of one : sewing, or tying together different discussion topics. Sometimes I think again about an old discussion when participating in a new one, and so I cite it. But this message is still fundamentally part of the new discussion, while the newly established link should be of equal interest to participants of both threads.
What we miss is for that message to be part of both conversations, or a clear way to automatically signify to both threads that something new happens. Of course, this can be done by hand, writing a comment in each cited branch to point to the new one. But we won't remeber to do that everytime, or we will not want to "necrobump", or we just don't want to make the extra effort. So it would be interesting if the relations were established automatically. For example the way I proposed for Friendica's quote-shares in the linked URL, or the way GitHub handles issue that cite each other.
Maybe two old topics will come to know about each other that way, effectively being sewed by the new thread.
I like the idea you described. Currently we have become so used to Microblogging (twitter-, mastodon-like) functionality.
This functionality is also done nicely in Discourse forums, where you can Quote selected text from earlier in the thread. You can expand the quote inline or jump to the comment post itself. And when you paste such quote in a new topic it creates a cross-reference, and you see a backlink in the original topic.
Also the Linked Data nature of the underlying data would make it possible to create all different kinds of associations, not just a plain cross-ref link.
Note that on #Friendica we can quote-share, and we can also do it in comments. As I discovered recently by playing in the below post
♲ @Liwott@lemmy.ml:
these make it through to #Lemmy when we do it in a comment, but not in a top-level post (which is already a great start !). So, in Friendica, all that's missing is the backlink !
This seems interesting, but I must say I don't directly see an application of this in the context of microblogging/commenting. Maybe you can inspire us here? 😀
I already gave some follow-up in this other comment. In general when brainstorming use cases it help to think what current Microblogging offers: basically an ordered timeline (stream) of sticky notes (
as:Note), and selecting a note renders a hierarchical discussion tree. What if there were more semantically meaningful objects in the stream, and non-hierarchical relationships (making it a true graph)?An example. Suppose a more academic setting for microblogging e.g. supported by scholar.social. I'd be making some claims in a toot and you respond with "References, please!". I could respond with another sticky notes with some URL's. But I might also respond by creating a
ac:Citationinstead, whose widget UI is decicated of making proper citations. Going further, instead of you sending me a "References, please!" sticky note, you might send me anInvite{ac:Citation}and my response mightUpdate{Note}my original toot and add citation cross-reference. Clients that don't support the message exchange in the Academics domain might still see a fallback to regular sticky notes like before.Next to inviting citations, it would also be nice for everyone to be able to add citations. Make it more of a collaborative effort than someone's time line.
Would it need a way to make clear we are really interested in the citation? I feel that most cases people ask for citations, they mean to say diplomatically that the claim is nonsense.
Yes, you are right. My example served purely to present a use case where richer semantics might make sense in a microblogging context. In an actual app you'd model the domain first and drill down to concrete vocabulary formats from there.
The problem is that if such tool comes to exisyence, the people who want to politely say bullshit will use that one out of politeness