Human Web CollectiveFEP drafting: Am I using “side effects” here the same way as other ActivityPub developers?
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Julian Fietkau
FEP drafting: Am I using “side effects” here the same way as other ActivityPub developers? I've seen the term used a bunch in casual conversation, but my personal understanding of it is kinda fuzzy.
@julian@fietkau.social yes you are correct as far as my limited understanding goes.
My personal definition of side effect limited to “unintended consequences”, which differs greatly from the ActivityStreams definition, so for my own sanity I avoid the term in my own documents 🙂
@julian I use side-effect a lot when talking about ActivityPub activities and I mean it close in context to its functional programming meaning, where an action can have side-effects which are not immediately observable from its input or output.
Ie, when a Create activity determines a server to persist an object to disk that's a side-effect of the Create. When an Undo activity removes its object activity from disk, that's another side-effect. They are not immediately observable from the results of the Activity upon its server or its client.
Does that make sense?
@mariusor I think I get it, yeah. Would that still fit with my draft definition? It feels weird to call it a side effect when a `Like` towards an object gets added to its `likes` collection, since that's arguably part of the intended effect. But that's what I'm picking up from the standard as well: w3.org/TR/activitypub/#likes
@julian close enough, i guess? it's the stuff that happens after you POST (think ifttt, service processing, that kind of stuff)
they can be automatic or manual, often automatic in the way most people use the term but i personally allow manual processing of "side effects" too