Yes, forum platforms too (incl #nodebb of course).
I do get the (very vague) impression discourse is focusing on integrating well with masto to a good extent and so might not integrate too well with the other Reddit/forum platforms. If true, that might be a good enough reason to start with another base. OTOH, it’s a familiar platform to many devs so adapting it for stackoverflow like use could go well right?
The free open source forum software NodeBB is now working on official Fediverse support. Federation isn't ready yet, but if this interests you, you might want to follow their account:
Since we just had issues with a #Discourse upgrade AGAIN on the OctoPrint community forums (the admin team is trying to fix things up as I'm typing this), does anyone here have experience with migrating from Discourse to #NodeBB by any chance?
Seriously considering a future move right now. We've had nothing but bad experiences with their "official supported way" of doing a self-hosted setup, and I feel really bad for the admins.
Finally figured out why #nodebb posts weren't queryable via Mastodon, turns out it does Content-Type checking, and I was inadvertently breaking #ActivityPub spec by sending in application/json when I should've been sending in "application/activity+json" or 'application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"'
Latter doesn't play nicely with express, so using the former and all's well!
Full credit to @bouncepaw who gave me key to figuring it out! 🏅
Mea culpa time — you might've heard that we're hacking away (in the best sense of the word) at #ActivityPub support in #NodeBB, but it turns out someone asked for it back in 2019 and it got zero buy-in from our founders 😥
It seems this happens occasionally on #fedi where malicious users decide to take advantage of instances with poor moderation to spam widely.
There are many solutions, but let me offer a simple change that stops spam dead in its tracks:
#nodebb has a post queue built in. If you have 0 reputation, you need your post to be manually approved. You can adjust this as needed, but even the default (allow regular posting after 1 upvote) is sufficient. Stops 👏spam 👏 cold 👏.
I'm looking forward to talking more about #NodeBB and #ActivityPub integration on here again, been distracted lately with other technical debt items — and of course — work to put food on the table 😄
Not going to lie, one of the support services is "mentoring on community building". You'd think the co-founder of a COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD SOFTWARE would be aces at building community, but truthfully, I really suck at it.
The fact that "build it and they will come" worked at all is miraculous.
ActivityPub is so neat! With all the new implementations coming out, it's slowly becoming my "one stop shop" internet aggregator.
For example, all from within my Mastodon instance I can:
Follow communities on Lemmy and Kbin, allowing me to interact with every post/comment and make my own post or comment to any community.
Follow my favorite podcasts and get new episodes directly in my feed via PodcastIndex.org
Follow WordPress blogs that have the ActivityPub plugin activated.
SOON enough I'll be able to:
Interact/follow accounts on Threads (and hopefully someday Instagram)
Follow/interact with comments/posts/communities from NodeBB forums.
This protocol is changing the internet and how I use it every day.
PS. If you want more information on how to do any of these things, just let me know and I will explain. Though please limit to asking about one or two at a time, as some are quite intricate in their implementations.
Edit: Nitter has been shut down 2 days after I posted this. Oh well. Fuck Xhitter
The Two-Factor Authentication plugin that comes bundled with #NodeBB was just updated to v7.4.0. It now notifies you if your account was accessed, but the second factor challenge was not passed. If you see this notification, and it wasn't you, you just might want to change your now-compromised password!
Oft forgotten, this feature provides much needed positive reinforcement that, yeah, #2FA works!
Thinking about Hacker News but sprinkled with #activitypub
imagine being able to reply and participate to any #HN post from the #fediverse and with #webmentions have fediverse comments mingled with native HN activity.
Just had an amazing call with @devnull of #nodebb on behalf of #flarum. His progress on their #federation implementation is already quite impressive. We've decided to keep in touch, share and collaborate on supported FEPs and regularly touch ground in the future.
People sometimes ask how we got #nodebb to be so fast and performant.
Our secret weapon is being #Canadian 🇨🇦 — you see... our internet is so fucking expensive we can't afford the faster plans, so we have to make our code run fast otherwise we will die before the page loads.
We hold the wonderful distinction of having the most expensive internet in the world on a $/mbits scale 🙄
For those who prefer a bulletin board interface for the #Fediverse, this is pretty darn attractive. Anyone who was active with Internet forums back in the ‘90s and ‘00s would love this quite a lot.
As many of us know, the problem with old Internet forums is that, while they provided a cozy community for folks who liked to follow specific topics, they often died because the likes of Facebook simply had a larger network effect.
But with NodeBB and ActivityPub, Internet forums may soon find that they have a network effect of hundreds of millions of people.
If you ever used Internet forums but have since stopped, would NodeBB’s foray into the Fediverse have you increase your participation with them again?
I'm hearing rumours that #NodeBB is adding support for #ActivityPub. Some folks have told me that this implementation will have group federation capabilities similar to #Lemmy and #Kbin.
I need to investigate this rumour further. If true, this is huge.
At the very least, I know NodeBB is discussing ActivityPub.
One drawback of POSSE is that you’re bolstering the value of the silos. Instagram grows more powerful with your pictures on it and GitHub thrives on your repos.
Sandra, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to catch your review, or rather, observation of POSSE, especially the long term ramifications from the PoV of #DeSoc.
For quite some time now, I've been advocating for something that describes a not so dissimilar modus operandi for extricating subjugated chattel from that of the #Borg_Collective.
POSSE has merit, being a partial design for disrupting the deprecated monolithic silos, but IMO actually falls short by only seeking to coexist with it, instead of completely obviating them.
As a dedicated FOSS and Privacy Advocate, here's my take on how we can follow a best practices modus operandi, achieving what can eventually relegate today's monolithic silos into the marginalized zone, sending them into the abyss of downtrodden insignificance.
The model can work from any Fediverse platform, but platforms that support a rich feature set with longform authoring capabilities work best, having the greatest impact. For those stuck using masto for the time being, their impact will be less dramatic, but nonetheless still valid.
The model I've been advocating goes like this:
) Create original content on Fediverse enabled properties you own, or cite (link to) content NOT residing in the deprecated silo space (Twitter, Medium, TikTok, InstaSPAM, YouTube, Faceplant, Reddit, Linkedin, Etc.). You can do this from pretty much any Fediverse platform - even masto, with its paltry 500 character limit. A paragraph or so as a rule of thumb, just a teaser/headline to create interest for the reader to follow the link.
) Optional: For added impact and if you have any, from your traditional silo account(s), as well as from less capable clones like masto, offer up a teaser, perhaps a paragraph or so, with a link to the URL of this original content.
) If you're merely pointing to an article or resource created by someone else that exists independently, that's it. Well done! If you created your original content in long form on a more capable Fediverse platform than masto - there are many excellent Fediverse platforms for doing this. A few of those are:
) Endeavor to never publish any actual content (articles, news, photos, videos) on platforms in the deprecated monolithic silo space. Instead, it is preferable to publish your photos, videos on demand, and textual content on a Fediverse Platform well suited to this. i.e., PeerTube for VoDs, Pixelfed for images, and one or more of the platforms mentioned above for textual or multimedia based content such as news articles, HowTo's, tutorials, recipes, Etc.
) Occasionally, you may find it necessary to link to content in the deprecated silo space - a video on YouTube, for example. You may be able to clone videos (depending on licensing) to a PeerTube server, but if not, then make sure you sanitize those videos by using tools such as Invidious that shield the viewer from tracking and other privacy disrespecting constructs built into those silo systems.
The philosophy here is to ensure that anything posted into the deprecated monolithic silo space entreats the reader/viewer to leave that space in order to consume the content.
This practice insures that the consumer of that information does so in a protected, privacy respecting place, presumably built on FOSS, and in the Fediverse. It further serves to familiarize the consumer in an easy and unassuming way, with Fediverse platforms that do not track them or mine their privacy.
For the Fedizen however, it provides a one way transit - anyone seeing a teaser/headline/intro on say, Twitter or Faceplant, is immediately catapulted away from those denizens of commodification that packages and inventories the consumer as the product for sale, depriving those platforms of the necessary revenue that sustains them - death by atrophe. No blissful coexistence, every single post inside the deprecated monolithic silo space is in fact an egress point bringing the consumer into a free and privacy respecting environment.
Obviously, an article on the New York Times website isn't ideal, but it isn't strictly one of the monolithic silo systems listed above either. In this case specifically, it's a walled garden however, so you're directing the consumer to a place where they'll be privacy mined anyway, which offers three other possibilities:
You can, and should unless you feel you absolutely must, elect not to send someone to that resource
You can, under certain circumstances, copy that data verbatim elsewhere and provide a link to that place where you copied the data.
You can also probably check with the AP, since we're talking about a newspaper outlet, most of which actually pull their news from the Associated Press and other similar networks that provide free access, which you can link to instead.
There's simply no way to completely ensure being so mindful of your consumers without precluding yourself from linking to some forms of interesting content - but the point here is that almost without exception, you're not sending anyone into the deprecated monolithic silo space - you're sending them into the Fediverse, where they'll begin to become comfortable with, eventually creating their own accounts here.
I recently had some discussions with a few folks who completely turned their back on things like Twitter, which is good because it is one of those social networking systems that engages in tracking and privacy mining. Those individuals have made it easy for themselves by simply putting the existence of those privacy disrespecting resources completely outside the real of consideration - it's not like anyone is going to suffer because they didn't visit Faceplant. They may suffer a bit of withdrawals, but bear the following in mind:
There are liquor stores on virtually every corner in the real world. They sell booze at liquor stores. An alcoholic must come to terms with this and learn to live with this fact, making a conscious choice to buy, or not to buy booze in those stores, or even go outside where the temptation is even greater.
That's not the greatest metaphor I know, or maybe I just didn't deliver it well. Either way, I hope that in understanding this death by atrittion model, that people can make better informed decisions about privacy for themselves and others.
I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the matter, and any tools that help assist folks in addressing privacy concerns. Please feel free to share this by boosting to raise awareness within the Fediverse (and beyond) of all the excellent platforms available to everyone in the Fediverse. I realize I left out large sectors of the Fediverse that can be factored into this formula - the link aggregators and forums like #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Kbin, #Mbin, #Discourse, and more. I didn't even directly address the purpose built single user instance platforms. Maybe we can give them some coverage in a later edition :)
As expected, when an instance attempts to respond to a Note with a larger audience than the note replied to, Mastodon will silently drop it from processing.
I don't actually know if this is codified anywhere in #ActivityPub or #ActivityStreams spec, but looking into it now. 💪
Edit: Might be it actually is processed, but doesn't link up to the more-restrictive parent. Also good I think. Not quite sure how I'd handle this in #nodebb ...
Last week I broke the screen on my phone and have been using an old broken Pixel 3a in the interim. A significant portion of the keyboard does not respond to taps, so I can't even log into Google (as the login screen is portrait-only), so no play store, and it's been an interesting experiment to carry on my day without apps.
First thought: people absolutely SUCK at building fast websites. Mastodon, Fastmail, Discord, Messenger (duh). Hot garbage.
At the end of the day, if an implementor chooses to send everything as as:Note, that's their call, but more "correct" types should be used. Even as:Page is a step in the right direction as it is sufficient generic to encompass a lot.
Perhaps #nodebb will send topics as as:OrderedCollection, because at its core, what is a topic but an ordered collection of posts/notes?
Maybe something I can try for the purpose of learning #Rust is setting up a real-time communication channel in #NodeBB (i.e. a socket that the web UI could use to show real-time information, typing indicators, etc). Maybe it's too easy or too hard... I also have an audio processing project I intend on doing in Rust but I haven't managed to get myself to do that yet.
Also, I still want #PikaPods to have NodeBB. It might become affordable for a lot more communities that way! There's a request lodged for it in their feedback thing but there's currently no indication they plan on adding it.
Disappointed, but not surprised, by the utter lack of interest in #ActivityPub over at #XenForo.
XF 2.2 was released in Sep 2020. XF 2.3 will drop sometime this year, however, IMHO, none of the new features were worth waiting 3+ years (a lifetime ago) for.
More Excellent developments on the good work being performed on #NodeBB and interoperability with #WordPress instances endowed with the #ActivityPub plugin:
Ideas to build a federated StackExchange alternative (ioc.exchange)
Codeberg was asking about this. The linked toot by a commenter points to :...