@evan for me, "the actual game" is maximizing people's expressiveness and letting them describe their lives one activity at a time. the goalpost is high fidelity and low miscommunication. a different goalpost might aim to lower fidelity just to get something to show up. if any conclusion seems ridiculous, then it's either not as ridiculous as it seems within a different framework, or there's something else that could be done to make it internally consistent. it's driven by use cases.

@evan i plead character limit and getting distracted by other things i'm doing rn, but i was using that as an example of a question that might *look* like an "intentional misinterpretation" but actually isn't. if you wanna publish activities then it's good faith to have discussions within the framework of publishing activities. but it could look like you're not playing "the actual game" by someone else's interpretation within a different framework.

@trwnh so, when you introduced the question about activities being content, was that to help me get to an answer about the separate topic I had raised?

@trwnh absolutely, we can and should accommodate diverse viewpoints.

@evan but what specifically incited my comment was the bit about people's intentions. i again can't speak for anyone else's intentions, but whenever i get involved in any conversation, i'm doing it to work toward some kind of practical answer. i'd like to assume others are doing the same, and that people aren't generally participating in bad faith or simply to have conversations with no conclusion.

@evan it wasn't intended as open question nor dog basketball. my point was we can either accommodate diverse viewpoints on what the "actual game" is and assume people are playing in good faith (and let them keep playing), or we close the door to those interpretations and uphold one of them as the correct interpretation (which might mean someone takes their ball and goes home). personally i'm team activity, but i'm not going to close the door on team note. i can't assume anyone else's position!

@trwnh it's good to undercut assumptions. I appreciate that you have an incisive mind and that you don't accept axioms. It's a healthy practice.

@smallcircles Anyway, yes, the way the extra fields work and their limited number is a product decision by Mastodon.

@smallcircles I'm not sure what you mean by app-centric. I think you mean Mastodon-centric, that is, how do we work around the Mastodon software and the Mastodon team? I agree that it is a frustrating part of working on the Fediverse.

@smallcircles Long term, I think it would be great to have a structured way to add properties and collections to actors that don't depend on the server software.

So, I could say, if you don't want tags.pub to boost your content, set the `https://tags.pub/ns/noTagsPub` property on your actor object to true. Or have a collection of allowed tags, or denied tags, or object types to boost, or object types not to boost.