In XEP 0277: Microblogging Over XMPP
(http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html), it is stated "People can
reply to your posts, but not directly comment on them."
I think people should be able to directly comment on a post, because the
way it is currently defined has serious drawbacks:
Say Juliet and Romeo have a "both" subscription, they can then see each
other's microblog posts. Juliet publishes an original post ("Going to a
party, saturday night") on its own node, Romeo receives it and responds
to it ("@Juliet. Great, I'm going too"). Juliet's contacts (that aren't
Romeo's) cannot see Romeo's response, even if it could have an interest
for them (they would be able to know that Romeo will be at the party
too). But worse: Romeo's contacts (that aren't Juliet's) won't know what
he is talking about since they didn't have the original post from Juliet.
This is really confusing for everyone (not Juliet nor Romeo, but for
their contacts. They can miss important posts, or receive posts that
they won't understand).
I think the XEP should describe a way for people to comment on a
specific post.
For example, Juliet's post could be a leaf node, with publish-only
access for all of her contacts (in the authorized group). This way,
Romeo would just have to post his "Great, I'm going too" on this node,
and Juliet's contacts would receive it, with the possibility for them to
respond (to the original post only), while Romeo's contacts won't get
confused by a post they cannot understand.
Obviously, this would make Romeo's post accessible for anyone in
Juliet's roster (in the authorized group, at least) and not in it's own
roster, but that's intended. That's the difference between a post (on
your own microblog) and a response (on someone else's).
The way it is currently looks like status.net, but since the posts
aren't open to anyone, replying to a post with a "@juliet"-like doesn't
make much sense.
The Roster access model is more adapted to something like Facebook,
where responses are posted by the friends directly on the original
poster's wall.
I know this would imply a big change of the XEP (currently each post is
just an item, so there's no simple way to define what a "thread" of
responses to a post is), but I think the current specification is
somewhat wrong.
--
Florent Le Coz
