Define group rules and code of conduct

[mayel]

"As a fediverse user, I want to see a group's rules before joining or posting, so I know what behavior is expected."

Groups often have a code of conduct that users have to agree to before joining or participating. We propose standardising how rules are represented on Group actors for federation.

Existing approaches:

• Lemmy: Exposes community rules simply as a part of the summary text on the Group
• Mastodon: Instance-level rules are an array of objects with id and text

Suggested representation:

A rules property, supporting translations via the existing ActivityPub contentMap pattern:

{
  "type": "Group",
  "id": "https://example.org/groups/1",
  "rules": [
    {
      "mediaType": "text/html",
      "name": "Be respectful",
      "nameMap": {"fr": "Soyez respectueux"},
      "content": "<em>No personal attacks</em> or harassment.",
      "contentMap": {"fr": "Pas d'attaques personnelles ou de harcèlement."}
    },
    {
      "mediaType": "text/plain",
      "name": "Stay on topic",
      "nameMap": {"fr": "Restez dans le sujet"},
      "content": "Keep discussions related to the group's topic.",
      "contentMap": {"fr": "Gardez les discussions liées au sujet du groupe."}
    }
  ]
}

Translation pattern:

• name / content - Default language text (based on the community's primary language)
• nameMap / contentMap - Language-tagged alternatives (standard ActivityPub pattern, W3C Activity Streams *Map properties)
• Instances should display the user's preferred language if available, falling back to the default

Backwards compatibility:

• Implementations not understanding rules or the rule attachments simply ignore them
• Rules don't affect protocol behavior - they're informational only
• Existing summary field can include a link to a page that display the rules for simpler implementations

Open questions:

• Should we use attachment or the like (reusing existing AP vocabulary) vs dedicated rules property (cleaner but new)?
• Should rules be orderable (numbered)? Could use an OrderedCollection or just rely on array order
• Should rules have categories or severity levels?
• Should Flag activities reference which rule was violated?

[trwnh]

using both name and nameMap is redundant btw, and results in either duplicate values or untagged languages:

{
  "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#name": [
    {"@value": "Be respectful"},
    {"@value": "Soyez respectueux", "@language": "fr"}
  ]
}

we could say that name/content(/mediaType) is all we need, i suppose? type doesn't really do anything useful here

---

re: open questions

• Should we use attachment or the like (reusing existing AP vocabulary) vs dedicated rules property (cleaner but new)?

ideally no? reusing attachment/tag doesn't actually get us anything here

• Should rules be orderable (numbered)? Could use an OrderedCollection or just rely on array order

inclined to say no, but we can't strictly rely on array ordering if we have canonicalization involved. the order will not be preserved. we can have a rule id or perhaps something like http://schema.org/ListItem and http://schema.org/position if ordering is strictly necessary and for some reason can't be done on id alone

• Should rules have categories or severity levels?

optional? they can be extended by publishers in any way the publishers deem appropriate. do we want to make this in-scope or not is a different question, though...

• Should Flag activities reference which rule was violated?

they can tag the rule yeah or some other such construct

[mayel]

they can tag the rule yeah or some other such construct

ah yeah nice, then we should give each rule an id