@julian @JessTheUnstill After a brief dive into the mastodon API documentation, it seems to be a protocol limitation indeed. You (or rather your client program) do not get to see the conversation ID until you join that conversation, so until then, you do not have the correct piece of information to request muting of that conversation.

Some references:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/#home
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/conversations/#get

@JessTheUnstill
I know you're talking about the default web client, but for what it's worth, some clients do include this mute option.

#fedilab

ticho@mas.to hey, I sort of disagree. While the protocol itself doesn't contain topic level information, it can be inferred from context.

This is how NodeBB achieves it. It also sends contextual information so it's explicitly available as well.

@JessTheUnstill this is an exceptionally useful tip. It's also grotesque that it would be needed in the first place.

@julian While in general, I agree, you could implement some sort of heuristics, there is one huge difference - a NodeBB server is centralized and sees everything. With Mastodon, half of the posts in a conversation might not be visible to you, either because of being outright blocked, or the post simply not hitting your instance because of where the participants post from.

Any heuristic based on unrelated metadata would be inaccurate at best, but more often than not outright misleading.

@JessTheUnstill
> Reply to a post, set the visibility to "Private Mention", remove everyone's username from the post. Post it. Then you can click "mute conversation" on THAT post, and it silently mutes you from the conversation

That's a really smart hack. It never would have occurred to me. I'd never even noticed that you can only Mute Conversation in your own posts!

(To be fair, that might not be the case in the third-party apps I use; Moshidon, FediLab and Enafore.social)

#FediTips

@julian This could theoretically be solved by simply adding the conversation id to each Status object in the timeline (and likely also any other post-like object that your client is receiving), but someone familiar with the entire protocol would need to look at this change, since it might bring compatibility issues.

@ticho @julian An important thing to remember with AP is that the AP protocol itself is pretty loose. Mastodon is one particular implementation of it, and doesn't even absolutely comply with the spec. Hence why some of the other server softwares have more features or slight incompatibility with Mastodon. So I'd be more inclined to believe that the oddities of conversation threading are in the Mastodon implementation rather than the AP spec itself.

Yes, some pendantry, but it means fixing it is down to one development team, not all Fediverse implementations.

@JessTheUnstill @julian Indeed. I started my earlier dive with AP docs, only to realize that they're too generic for what I'm looking for, and that I'm better off digging through Mastodon docs specifically to find details about timelines and conversations.

@xanna no, the conversation ID is part of the post because you initiated it from a reply. The usernames just indicate who is allowed to see the post

@webhat wait, does a poll mute the conversation?

@xinit does it also give that option even in a conversation you've not commented on yet?

@xinit another question - if you mute it in fedilab, is the conversation still muted if you later go into a web UI or another device? Just curious how that's implemented.

@JessTheUnstill
FYI just checked, Enafore has the limitation you described, Moshidon and FediLab both allow Mute Conversation on any post, including other people's.

@strypey Just checked Moshidon - you can mute from any post, but only in conversations you've posted in. Go try another post that you've not been in the conversation at all.

@JessTheUnstill instead of muting it snoozes the conversation, however, combining it with a mute, won't create a timed mute. It's just muted outright

ticho@mas.to jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange while I'm not working with the Mastodon team the folks at the ForumWG actually did start making inroads to solving this.

Latest Mastodon version should actually supply that conversation ID! It can even be resolved to retrieve all the replies in that entire thread.

@ticho @JessTheUnstill @julian but, couldn’t the client offer the ability to mute a conversation you are not a part of by streamlining silently those very steps ?
If I’m part of a conversation I can choose to mute it because my server (hence my client) knows it’s particular ID, if I’m not part of it my client creates an empty private post as a reply and mutes normally from there.
It’s just a workaround, ofc, but I don’t see any reason for it not to work.

@Vive_Levant @JessTheUnstill @julian Absolutely it could!

Technically, it could be considered as abusing the API, but at least it would maybe motivate the developers to come up with a better solution.

Looks like there is a rather old and inactive feature request for this at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12308

@JessTheUnstill how are you getting nonfictions for a thread you haven’t taken part in? Or are you just wanting to not see something?