Would love to hear your reasoning why!
Personally, I like the possibility of tangents in Reddit BUT I think I prefer the focus of staying on topic from a single thread.
Last week, I started my initial forays into retrieving and parsing remote content from the #fediverse. As expected much of the data structures are identical to #ActivityPub but named and organized differently, so there's a lot of bits and pieces that need connecting.
Nevertheless, it's thrilling to see remote content on a local instance!
I'm guessing the "conversation" value in an #ActivityPub Note object is #Mastodon specific, and other implementors have adopted it as a pseudo-standard?
Did some digging and it doesn't seem well supported. Happy to use it for #nodebb but bsd.network, for example, just sends the object id with #ctxt appended, which when queried just returns the same object. #Mastodon not surprisingly doesn't send one at all.
What I'm trying to get as is it doesn't seem there is one property I can rely on, so I may just have to create my own contexts as I go.
@leroy@multiverseofbadness yeah the idea is there'd be two-way communication between the local #nodebb instance and the #socialweb. Any less and it wouldn't be what I envision for my implementation 🙂
Also thanks for the kind words about the design. It took up much of our time and was released last year for our v3 of NodeBB... which is also when I discovered #Mastodon 😁
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.
Does there exist a brief write-up of how content is federated out? Do different #ActivityPub implementors federate content differently? (@stesnac suggests so!)
Here's my head-canon at present... when a note is created, the note is sent to all followers. If users are mentioned, the note is also sent to those users' inboxes.
If a note is addressed to the public collection, do it just get blasted to all known instances' inboxes?
"Meta's fediverses", federating with Meta to allow communications, potentially using services from Meta such as automated moderation or ad targeting, and potentially harvesting data on Meta's behalf.
"free fediverses" that reject Meta – and surveillance capitalism more generally
The free fediverses have a lot of advantages over Meta and Meta's fediverses, some of which will be very hard to counter, and clearly have enough critical mass that they'll be just fine.
Here's a set of strategies for the free fediverses to provide a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism. They build on the strengths of today's fediverse at its best – including natural advantages the free fediverses have that Threads and Meta's fediverses will having a very hard time countering – but also are hopefully candid about weaknesses that need to be addressed. It's a long list, so I'll be spreading out over multiple posts; this post currently goes into detail on the first two.
Opposition to Meta and surveillance capitalism is an appealing position. Highlight it!
Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
Emphasize "networked communities"
Support concentric federations of instances and communities
Consider "transitively defederating" Meta's fediverses (as well as defederating Threads)
Consider working with people and instances in Meta's fediverses (and Bluesky, Dreamwidth, and other social networks) whose goals and values align with the free fediverses'
Build a sustainable ecosystem
Prepare for Meta's (and their allies') attempts to paint the free fediverses in a bad light
Reduce the dependency on Mastodon
Prioritize accessibility, which is a huge opportunity
Commit to anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ principles, policies, practices, and norms for the free fediverses
@underlap content migration has historically been a difficult problem to solve simply because all these companies and softwares operate in pseudo-competition with one another.
For example #nodebb can migrate posts from #phpBB#vBulletin etc., but it's all custom migrators.
Something as simple as a common format for data portability would go a long way towards ease of content migration.
I am not certain many users elect to use or not use platforms based on portability though.
Would I be a bad #ActivityPub implementor if I don't maintain a "feed"?
If a post is created, NodeBB would send the Create activity to all of the author's followers, and that post would be displayed on that app, usually in the form of a feed.
On the other hand, if other apps send Creates to me, I can save them, but there's no place to display them organically within the existing forum structure 🤔 — since they're not part of an existing topic/category/etc...
@steve@mariusor am I reading this right, that if you didn't happen to already be around to receive the Create activity from a Mastodon instance, you're SOL and you'll never be able to retrieve it (at least within the bounds of the #ActivityPub spec)?! That's ... a choice, I suppose.
As for intent in the original toot, I am referring to S2S implementation. #NodeBB will definitely have an S2S inbox endpoint.
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.
I've said it before and will say it again, that the #NodeBB team for the past ten years has been graced with a huge amount of luck. With the right people just happening to come along at the right time, to clients taking a chance on a trio of literal nobodies, etc.
That kind of luck doesn't last forever, and so I'm very excited to work with the @NGIZero to really supercharge our #DevRel
@thisismissem@NGIZero I've been passively noting that you've been working on trust & safety in the #fediverse, is that right? Definitely something we'll want to discuss sooner rather than later — bridging #NodeBB's built-in moderation tools with fediverse standards would be a win for us all.
@aral ha! As with all abominations sometimes there are places they can be helpful?
I was building out additive permissions in #nodebb when I needed to communicate to the end user that even though a specific privilege was not checked, that in reality, though the additive nature, it may as well have been. (e.g. a particular user group may not have the privilege to post new topics, but if the global registered users group does, then all other groups do too). An indeterminate checkbox was perfect 🤷♂️
Back in late July, we took a chance and applied for the @NGIZero NGI0 Core August 2023 call for projects. Our application dealt almost entirely with bringing #ActivityPub to #NodeBB, and we're happy to announce that we've been officially greenlit!
Looking forward to working in tandem with some other highly esteemed colleagues @helge and @tchambers with their testing suites too 🙂 (edit: @J12t too!)
The other small part of our application dealt with much-needed accessibility audits and fixes 💪
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!
Special shout-out to @nodebb for bringing this amazing #foss#opensource platform 🙂 with no strings attached.
Considering things that recently happened to #unity#unity3d it is absolutely necessary to take everything into consideration before committing into a #proprietary software.
If you look at Wikipedia's list of forum software, it's all ancient except discourse, and discourse seems unlikely to ever be something great for users
Its performance is famously terrible. People often point out how unusable it is unless you have a fast phone and the founder's response to this has been to rant about how Qualcomm sucks and need to make faster processors
@jernej__s@danluu hey, I can provide some context for that. In 2014 or 2015 maybe, we wrote an article for #NodeBB on #Wikipedia, and it got AfD'd for being non-notable. Subsequent attempts to reintroduce the article were immediately deleted, and doing it the "right way" (aka, submitting a draft for review) went unanswered.
Overzealous editors have their fiefdoms and the "list of forum software" is one. No article = no entry, and when we make one we get shut down.
More updates to the chat UX (pinning, public room notifications, real-time typing notifications), improved user moderation tooling, post queue updates, and as usual, lots of bug fixes 😳
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.
@leroy nothing so specific, at that point I was only doing a thought experiment at a high level.
I am still working out ideas, but I have been leaning towards broadcasting the "Announce" activity when a local #NodeBB user decides to move a post out of the "federated" topic list and into the local categories.
There is also this #FEP, which I am inclined to follow for the sake of being a team player 😆
@leroy hmm... that's something I haven't thought about yet, but because now we're talking about how #NodeBB would handle it locally, the options are wide open.
Could be that when shared to the local hierarchy, it is placed at the top of the topic listing (as expected), but further shares/boosts don't adjust its positioning.