This entire time I was dwelling on how exactly to work in #Mastodon's global feed to the forum concept when I was looking at it backwards. I don't need to make a forum have a federated feed, that's not my job.
If someone mentions one of my users via #ActivityPub, I don't have to provide full context like Mastodon does, I really only have to provide a notification and a link to the remote instance.
@jdp23@carnage4life obviously I don't want to have my integration be selfish like that, though, so there's a middle ground somewhere. That's the question I'm now figuring out just how to answer.
@jdp23@carnage4life for example, a forum has (sub-)categories, and a feed if present is incidental.
I could (and probably should) provide two-way communication between #Mastodon and #NodeBB, but I only really have to provide context wrt the reply chain.
@counteractor@jdp23 there's merit in sticking to your lane when it comes to deciding what kind of app you want to be. You can do all things kinda crappily, or do a few things really really well.
Some quick examples:
NodeBB is a forum first, and a chat second (chats were replacements for older forums' DM systems)
#Discord and #Slack started building out threading/forum-style functionality. Arguably, it leaves much to be desired.
@jdp23@counteractor I liken it to the "first-mover advantage". While there have been federated apps before #Mastodon, Mastodon managed to reach critical mass relative to other #fediverse apps.
That allows them to call the shots about a lot of implementation direction.
@devnull Yeah it's certainly a dynamic. tbh it's more embrace-and-extend than first mover. Gnu Social and other OStatus implementations were there beforehand but Masto''s innovations in 2016-2017 -- including things like per-post privacy and content warnings that extended the OStatus spec -- led to dominance at the same time #ActivityPub was standardizing.
@carnage4life so if I’m understanding you you’re almost suggesting something like, for example, a sort of guide or chart to organize and navigate the Federated feed here?
@seachanger That isn't the implementation I had in mind.
I want something more in the spirit of reddit where you can tell which communities/instances various posts come from and then can choose to look at the global feed of those communities/instances and then decide to join or participate.
@carnage4life interesting. It does seem like Reddit’s structure has stood the test of time. I keep thinking about sites like Craigslist and Wikipedia that are relatively simple but also functional for people to use or collaborate on. What can we learn from the systems that work well over time?
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