More Excellent developments on the good work being performed on #NodeBB and interoperability with #WordPress instances endowed with the #ActivityPub plugin:
Thanks @pfefferle! All I did was implement the protocol as many others have done. Half the credit would go to you as well for the other end of the integration!
It is really cool to be able to follow a blog from a forum. Are comments from the fediverse integrated?
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?
@atomicpoet@fediversenews really cool to see @julian@devnull get some publicity. I'm so excited for stuff like this. AP needs more variety of types of services just to show off what this awesome protocol can do!
I have so many follow relationships with so many talented people here!
It's so great to see all of you and your interesting projects and creations across such a variety of hobbies and professions.
It's only going to get better with Threads federation under way! Future of Fedi will sure be interesting and I'm glad to be a part of something that could fundamentally change the way "Internet" is done as a whole.
The future awaits. After years of gaining steam, Fedi has arrived.
(adres z forum wbity w szukajke mastodona wyświetli się)
"Dziś jest dzień, w którym nasze forum społeczności łączy się z #fediverse. Zaktualizowaliśmy kod i przełączyliśmy się na gałąź #activitypub, a także włączyliśmy federację w dwóch kategoriach, kategorii #NodeBB Development (która jest tylko do odczytu dla wszystkich oprócz staff NodeBB) oraz Testing Ground, która jest przeznaczona dla treści bez znaczenia."
Tak więc nowa wersja NodeBB ma federację profili i publicznych postów, komentarze z fedi "widzi" i uwzględnia 🚀 🎉
The fediverse has long had the struggle that the wider network consists of a huge variety of product types, but that in most people’s conceptualisation it mainly consists of microblogging. The news this week is another indication of the need for a broader understanding of what the fediverse is, with the announcement of an Open Science Network, as well more and more tighter integration of forum software into the fediverse with both NodeBB and Discourse.
Open Science Network announced
The Open Science Network is a new fediverse project, based on the to-be-released Bonfire project. Bonfire is a modular platform for the fediverse, for more information on that I wrote about it recently, as did WeDistribute. Bonfire aims to be modular and customisable and allow for a variety of extensions to be build on top of it. The Open Science Network project takes the Bonfire platform, and is working on adding a variety of features for building an open science network. The Open Science Network will have the ability to sign in with ORCID, automatically import publications, the ability to work collaboratively on papers, and more. Bonfire and the Open Science Network have not given an estimation for when the project launches.
Forum Federation
Forum software NodeBB now connects to the fediverse! In the February update, developer Julian Lam shows that the forum for NodeBB itself is now connected to the fediverse. You can see the post made on NodeBB on Mastodon for example. The project is still under development, but major functionality is now available, with both accounts and public posts now bi-directionally federating. This means you can follow NodeBB accounts from the rest of the fediverse, and posts by NodeBB accounts you follow show up in your fediverse. Comments you make with your other fediverse account also show up in the comment section of the NodeBB posts. The announcement posts shows some examples, with some replies being made by Mastodon accounts that show up in the NodeBB forum topic.
Meanwhile, Discourse has also made progress with their ActivityPub plugin, so that Discourse forums now also are able to follow fediverse accounts. It is unclear at this point how federation between these forums will interact. One thing is clear though, with the development of ActivityPub integrations for NodeBB, Discourse coming online, as well as platforms like PiedFed and Sublinks, is that innovation and change in the fediverse is not happening in the space of microblogging, but of forums instead.
In other news
Newsmast has released a new update, allowing anyone to log into their platform with their current Mastodon account. This way, you can experience their curated community feeds on their platform, without having to make a new account at all. The ability to log in with your Mastodon account sidesteps one of the issues that the fediverse currently has, namely the need for a new account for every new project. For more information on Newsmast, TechCrunch published an extensive article on the project, which is worth checking out.
Funkwhale is working towards a version 2.0, and in their latest update they talk about how to ‘make Funkwhale a truly interoperable and social platform for audio enthusiasts and content creators everywhere’. Funkwhale is still early in the process, and shows how much unsolved the concept of federation is. People have some understanding of what federation means in the context of microblogging, but federation of platforms that serve other functions that microblogging is still an under-explored space.
Benjamin Bellamy, who is behind the Castopod project, joined the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, to talk about Castopod and ActivityPub. In the episode, Bellamy says that currently somewhere between 300 and 500 people have installed their own version of Castopod, up from a couple dozen a year ago.
Content Nation is a platform in development that has been working on adding ActivityPub integration that experienced significant backlash this week. WeDistribute has an article explaining the situation.
The Links
Threativore is an automoderator bot for the threadiverse by @db0.
A blog exploring the bridging between the fediverse and the ATmosphere from the perspective of GDPR.
Mona, a Mastodon client for iOS and MacOS has a major update, v6, and MacStories has an extensive review of the update.
A study on ‘User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms’.
The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group is restarting a schedule of monthly group calls.
Mastodon updated their Android app, allowing you to share your profile via a QR code.
The Decentered Podcast’s latest episode is an interview with @jaz from IFTAS.
For Dutch-speaking people: PublicSpaces is organising a workshop to help guide public organisations in The Netherlands to make a transition towards Mastodon.
A blog by Codeberg reflecting on the recent spam wave in the fediverse.
Regular meetups for the FediDevs group are restarting, with the first one being March 7th, with a show-and-tell of FediTest.
Friendica has a script to make Friendica user nicknames function as Bluesky user handles.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
@thenexusofprivacy it's additional work to implement an allow-list for federation, although not much more than instituting a deny-list. What's easier is accepting content from everywhere, but I can definitely see how indiscriminately accepting content from just anywhere is a recipe for potential abuse.
I'd like NodeBB to support both, although it might not be available during alpha phase.
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?
Obviously, every implementor supporting every #ActivityStreams type differently is a tall ask, but moving away from "everything as as:Note" to "as:Note, as:Article, and as:Page" is a small but important evolution in protocol interpretation.
@0x1C3B00DA Our working understanding right now will treat the "unlisted" visibility level as a Mastodon-only quirk that has no meaning in #nodebb. Will update with more info re: post ACLs as we develop.
#Mastodon supports mentioned-only which is unintentionally leaky (one errant mention and the jig is up). We intend to fully de-couple mentions from the ACL, so you can mention anybody you want, but that doesn't change the ACL if you restrict visibility to certain people.
@0x1C3B00DA we are honestly not entirely sure how to handle the #GDPR aspect. We may have to put together a public working group (incl. lawyers) to discuss.
If your service processes Undo and Delete activities, you could argue that you adhere to Right to be Forgotten, but there is more to GDPR than just erasure/modification.
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 👏.
@toddalstrom all of this has been figured out by the forums 10+ years ago. The spam is just getting more sophisticated and larger in volume, but the old solutions still work because they introduce a second DIFFERENT element to the spam equation a human.
You can beat tech with more tech (e.g. CAPTCHA vs CAPTCHA) but you need to leverage social engineering against a human. Not infallible by any means, but a huge sharp turn away from what beats tech.
@devnull Weird thought here, but Misskey and Sharkey have a concept of badges..you earn badges for actions like logging in X times in X days, liking X number of posts, etc.
Wonder if that could be used as a basis for contribution levels prior to allowing federated posting. Make it fun, not a labor.
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.
@luceos@devnull This is exciting. With Discourse looking at an ActivityPub plugin, nodeBB's progress, and now Flarum getting into the mix, this is an increasingly exciting time for those of us who enjoy forums as communication medium and community focus.
I'm looking forward to see how everyone tackles the more traditional forum moderator abilities with the fuzzy borders that come with federation.
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.
I'm not even sure what to blame, and yeah, I'm totally biased here, because #nodebb is a product I built from the ground-up, but seriously people.
Why am I, some common schmuck of a dev, able to build something that beats the pants off of every existing site, speed-wise, with only minimal focus on speed?
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 ...
@devnull Pro tip: for testing against Mastodon (or really AP in general), you could try to run the activitypub.academy software, which shows the activities it receives (and maybe sends?) in a log. I would have recommended activitypub.academy itself but it seems to be down.
@blake thanks! I do use it actually, although as you say, it's a little fragile at times. I tried using it to send stuff back and forth and the entire thing went down momentarily 🫤
Also activitypub.academy is like Mastodon but isn't quite... might be a fork of an earlier version? There were some minor differences that would've caused headaches if I didn't test it live, so to say... 😅
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.