joakim / tent-link

Suggestion for a Tent post type for link sharing/referencing.

This is a suggestion for a new post type, it does not yet exist. WIP. See Thoughts for more.

See also my suggestion for the related Share post type.

Link

A simple Tent post type for sharing/referencing a URL, typically to a web page.

Posts of other types may reference link posts for use in the context of that post.

Some examples:

• A share post could have only a message field and reference the link post that has the URL.
• A bookmark post could reference a link post and provide metadata in its own fields.
• A status post could reference a link post for sharing in a conversation. This would be an alternative to adding the URL inline in the text field of the status post.

In these examples, you'd have to create two posts; first the link itself and then the parent post (share/bookmark/status). Tent servers will return any referenced posts as part of the return data for a queried post, so the link post would be included when a share post is retrieved.

Schema

Property	Required	Type	Description
url	Required	String	The URL, obviously.

Example

{
  "content": {
    "url": "http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/",
  }
}

Thoughts

What would be best – a minimal, generic link post ref'd by other posts, such as bookmark, share, status, whatever? Or specific post types for each use case, with a url field? Maybe this depends on the use case?

Having the link as its own post opens up for metadata about that link to be stored alongside it. It also allows for reuse of the link, although I'm not sure there's any value in that.

Questions:

• What's the performance and storage cost of using refs a lot?
• Wouldn't a side effect of a generic link type be that if you subscribed to someone's link posts, you'd get anything from bookmark links to share links to links referenced by anything, without the context? Maybe this really isn't an issue, and people would only subscribe to share and bookmark directly.
• (crazy brainstorming impulse) Could web links even be part of the post schema, on the same level as refs, mentions and attachments?

Make sure to also see my suggestion for a Share post type.