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.
I've been musing passively about how I can develop locally while still making #ActivityPub requests in order to test with real HTTP requests, and was pretty close to just deploying my code on a test subdomain (and then making the call to my #Mastodon server — crag.social), but then realized I could just stand up two #NodeBB instances on my machine and have them gab to each other instead
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:
@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.
@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.
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
I wish I had somebody else seriously involved with Owncast. It would be amazing to have somebody to share things with, positive or negative. But there's nobody else in the world who cares, or even understands the nitty gritty day to day that I can talk to. I'm sure there's people who would listen, but nobody would care.
The lemmyverse sounds perfect, but it ignores alternatives like kbin etc. It would be better if we didn't end up with the situation we have with Mastodon where people assume Mastodon is the fediverse....
Initial federated contact made! My local dev instance has just made its first calls to a remote #Mastodon instance (via #WebFinger discovery) to retrieve a remote user account!
One small step for #NodeBB, ah... also one small step for the #Fediverse I guess.
@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.
"Is there something better coming?” I think it’s #Mastodon; and I think it’s Mastodon for a bunch of reasons. One is that the Mastodon standard was developed when the tech platforms were totally disinterested and didn’t have their fingers on the scale...."
@mjgardner@tchambers@pluralistic well, as per #GDPR the minimum is to be able to export the data in a common format. We use csv at #nodebb, and while you can't easily reimport that format back to another piece of software it is still possible at least.
What do we call the Lemmy/Kbin Universe?
The lemmyverse sounds perfect, but it ignores alternatives like kbin etc. It would be better if we didn't end up with the situation we have with Mastodon where people assume Mastodon is the fediverse....