@ben very neat. My only detraction from this is that it precludes other #foss projects from implementing first-class #ActivityPub support because of its paid nature (but I 100% understand the need to do so, hosting isn't free!)
Bundling the open source server in with a project also seems like it'd be complicated, so at least for #NodeBB it sounds like we may still have to forge on ahead with our own implementation.
the best thing masto can do right now, imo, is to prioritize features & support for organizing communities.This is why facebook has society in its jaws, people are able to easily create, find, and post in any number of communities they overlap with.
if mastodon or an adjacent fediverse platform can better facilitate self-organizing communities, they will win all the spoils and then some
This #canadaday weekend, traffic increased so much on #Mastodon that I think my little cloud VPS is starting to struggle to keep up with the volume of incoming content. My feed is about 15 minutes behind, currently 😬
I think I may just throw in the towel and move on over to #mastohost
@multiverseofbadness@Jerry yeah I'm used to #NodeBB running on a potato server, so I was really surprised that a single-user instance needed such beef.
Although I guess 2GB is not a lot of beef. It's all relative 😁
I'm simultaneously excited and dreading to see how NodeBB can handle a really active inbox...
Shoutout to all of the contributors to SourceGraph whose work was just made closed source, big thanks to SourceGraph for pissing on them, I'm sure they really appreciate it. All those users who thought your FOSS product was really cool surely still think your product is super cool now that you've taken their rights away
@drewdevault I'm not sure why you're being so aggressive right now.
There's no exclusive right to commercialization with #NodeBB, none is expected, and someone could start a competitor with our software if they so wished.
I reached out to try to have a civil discussion about our rationale for requiring a CLA, and to explore alternative solutions, but you seem more interested in shaming others instead of talking.
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 😥
@shoq that would be very welcome and is much appreciated. At some point I'll have a private beta for testing.
The thing is I myself am very new to the #fediverse. There's a lot of nuance and expectations over how fediverse apps work, that #NodeBB ought to follow. There's a time and a place to push boundaries and break things, but I don't think that time is now 😉. Working with people experienced with the status quo would provide a good objective review.
Also - checked out BrutalLinks just yeaterday and will look in more after this exhausting trip! 🤣 I've been working on a fediverse client for myself I want to ultimately incorporate it into my online game but also add better fediverse safety features
@devnull has a great message board program at #NodeBB he's been incorporating ActivityPub into as well and is putting together a small resource group for ActivityPub coders to share thoughts.. wanted to introduce you two!
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.
I could easily do a test with this idea using RSS to autofeed a #Discourse or #Nodebb forum and then consume the firehose from #Fediverse, just for fun!
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:
@stanford good point! We don't highlight the #foss aspect as much because we sell hosting, professional support & maintenance, and custom dev in order to feed ourselves and fund development of the forum software. We're a one product shop and every dollar we earn goes towards #nodebb 🙂
I like to stay principled when it comes to our offering. You won't see a gimped "community" version while gating the cool stuff behind a paywall. Most things we build are available to everyone under #mit license.
@bgtlover also related, both display their replies threaded, which is different from #NodeBB which is linear by default. Different but not better or worse. NodeBB can support threaded too, but linear is the happy path for us.
For the moment, when Lemmy can connect to tens of thousands (MAUs), & Kbin can connect to millions (MAUs). Personally I'm going to go with my Kbin account.
Both platforms need development. Also other forum platforms are taking up ActivityPub #NodeBB#Flarum#Discourse so this space on the Fediverse is going to expand & evolve quite a bit. #Fediverse#RedditMigration
Hi @evan@cwebber @pfefferle
Timely question: Does anyone know the status of a formal or informal building out an #ActivtyPub test suite, akin to the one used to test http://webmention.rocks but for Acitivity pub.
I know the activitypub.rocks effort ended & I see this one that seemed to evolve from that but has been derelict for a while.
I have been using a $100 temporary Android phone while waiting for my fancy phone to get replaced under warranty and the experience with the stock OS is just so so bad. Like barely usable most of the time. Even the GPS and wifi don't work well.
Most people worldwide use cheap Android phones on old versions of the OS and this was a good reminder that just because my mobile app/site works well on my fancy phone, it might work hardly at all for most people.
@dalias heheh touche, sites should work on < 3G too!
#NodeBB has issues with uber slow connections, something I don't like, but would love to fix. It's that initial 400kb js payload, sometimes that's enough when combined with a flaky connection, to stop the page from loading properly.
We've got @devnull working on it. I'm hoping we don't miss the boat by the time it can be rolled out, but we want to do right by the #fediverse and come out swinging with a highly interoperable frontend to the fediverse-at-large.
Stay tuned here for more info as the story (and branch) develops!
@tchambers@nodebb I've been vaguely following along, mostly because @smallcircles lets me know when something happens on that front. I honestly wish them the best. If #NodeBB, Discourse, and Flarum all federate, that's only a win for the #fediverse
@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.
@trwnh you said earlier today — "having a topic is a useful feature or abstraction, and i'd like to see literally any support or thought given to it"
💯 will do. A post created in @nodebb will have a topic associated with it in its metadata as you've suggested. That just makes complete sense. It would continue to exist in the (sub-)category hierarchy already present in #nodebb
@trwnh The reverse is a different story — if someone mentions someone from #nodebb, how would that look?
I might create some sort of pseudo-category for that. As long as I can keep going up the inReplyTo chain to reach the root-level post/note, then I can render the entire "topic", such as it is.
I don't know how I'd render an entire tree of post replies, but that is a problem for future me.
@trwnh@nodebb happens to display everything in a linear format (as opposed to threaded), so viewing some particularly active threads from #Mastodon in their entirety might get a little confusing, but it's the easiest way for me to not subvert user expectations when using the forum.
#nodebb also does support threaded view, but not by default (requires some customization)
@trwnh ahh.. got it... best effort would be whatever the #nodebb instance ends up having pushed to it, I suppose... because even with a context, that doesn't necessarily mean I am able to get the whole thread.
As it turns out, a lot of #ActivityPub verbs and objects correspond quite nicely with #nodebb verbs and objects (e.g. a like would be an upvote, etc.)
However I'm not exactly sure how the "announce" verb would translate. In #Mastodon, "announce" is a "boost". The closest forum-land equivalent would be the "bump", whereby a topic is brought back to the top of the list (usually through a reply).
Only downside, bumps are reserved for admins. Non-admins "bump" a topic by replying to it.
@trwnh Some good ideas for me to explore. #nodebb also has the concept of topic references, although it functions more like backlinks. Shoe-horning announce into that also doesn't seem right, so I'll have to dwell on it a bit more.
The other neat thing is that posts in NodeBB also aren't strictly tied to topics, so it's fairly easy for us to support recursive chains of inReplyTo in the backend. One less thing to think about.
People hate Facebook but the groups can be good. My local native plant gardening group is delightful. The only problem is that get too many notifications for all of the useful comments.
@jdp23@jonny initially the concept behind the R&D push was to find a way to network disparate #nodebb instances together. I was initially going to design a bespoke protocol of sorts when I also happened to coincidentally explore Mastodon and #ActivityPub at the same time. The pieces fell into place after that...! Not the whole picture by any stretch, but the broad strokes for sure.
We sometimes field requests from people who want to import their existing users in from a separate user database. While we normally recommend the use of a single sign-on plugin (#sso) to act as an alternative authenticator, we also now support user import via CSV.
Back in April, we updated our publish scripts to push new images to the GitHub Container Repository #ghcr instead of #Docker — if you use Docker to deploy #NodeBB, switching is pretty straightforward.