This is an important thing to consider, and why NodeBB decided to even pursue federation at all.

It’s arguable that we’ve reached the point at which forums cannot organically grow due to the ubiquity of social media. Depending on who you ask, we’ve reached that point 10+ years ago already.

It’s becoming increasing imperative that forums federate or risk dying due to attrition. Forums used to be the social network for niche topics. Facebook (with Groups) and Twitter (with hashtags) started competing, and Reddit (with subreddits) made another huge dent.

There are some communities that fear integrating with AP will cause their local communities to become flooded with just anybody. Those fears are unjustified, but understandable.

Heckin’ yeah it is. :sunglasses:

Hey! Thanks for the concise reply. There’s a lot of technical stuff I can say about Discourse and such, but because I am the maintainer for NodeBB it is probably in my best interest to keep my mouth shut as we directly compete!

Anyhow, the OrderedCollection stuff is actually all from me. I’ve been working as part of the Threadiverse working group to bring intercompatible formats to all threadiverse software, which besides Discourse and NodeBB, includes Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin.

The OrderedCollection enables software (like NodeBB) to quickly backfill entire topics. This is a huge problem on the microblog-side of the fediverse, and is not really a problem on the theadiverse, since there is already strong support for synchronization. However, smaller instances often do run into issues where they can’t ever “catch up” on old posts because there’s no way to get those posts. (e.g. start following a new community, you can’t read any of the old content)

To that end, Lemmy and Piefed have (or soon will) ship code to allow software to backfill using OrderedCollections. They don’t use them yet, but they will provide them. It helps software like mine because I will then be able to see entire threads from communities I don’t even know about or follow. It’s a huge boost to discovery! :smile:

> while Discourse decided to use an OrderedCollection, with the first item being the opening post.

NodeBB also does this, but they’re not incompatible per se. You’ll see NodeBB topics showing up just fine on Lemmy and Piefed (see activitypub@community.nodebb.org or general), and that’s because NodeBB does the extra step of announcing OP and replies, just like Lemmy/Piefed.

Importantly, Discourse does this too, but because of the inability to find Discourse categories, I don’t think it’s easy to follow them. Chicken and egg, really. The way the AP integration in Discourse is built-out, it is more insular by design. Threads from Discourse only ever go out to the fediverse, you can’t post in from the fediverse. That makes those communities much more insular by design and severely limits discovery.

Now this is a good reason to move a community to a different region.

I’m sorry, this is not how federation works, and if it were truly as limited as “one activity at a time”, moving a community to an entirely different continent is a fantastically short sighted idea.

Moving geographically closer to something else is important if you need real-time savings (e.g. high frequency trading, scientific research). ActivityPub is an asynchronous communications protocol built upon technology with decent if occasionally dubious reliability. Doing something this drastic to shave off ~100ms is not correct.

auster@thebrainbin.org you’re right, the experience is definitely sub-par, and it’s because both Mastodon and the Threadiverse use the Announce activity for different purposes.

Mastodon uses it to boost posts to the feed (overriding existing logic re: replies being suppressed), and the Threadiverse uses it to keep different instances up to date.

It could be made better in that when a group actor announces a reply, Mastodon doesn’t promote it to the feed. Not sure if that’s easy to do.

In a nutshell, it’s because you don’t have to build the entire kit and kaboodle all at once.

Lots of BlueSky is centralized so you don’t have to worry about distribution, user, hosting, scaling, etc. and just focus on the frontend.

It’s the same reason why all the Lemmy and Mastodon apps look way better than the web versions, because all those other parts are no longer relevant and the creator(s) can focus on just putting out a polished product.

FYI all the Mastodon team is looking for feedback on featured collections (aka “starter packs”) so they may check in on this post 🙂

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that… unfortunately debugging server-to-server interactions is kind of tough. It should work though, so I don’t know why it didn’t… yet. It could be their version of NodeBB isn’t up to date enough.

cwsmith@community.darkscribes.com cwsmith@community.nodebb.org are you able to weigh in and let me know the NodeBB version? Could also be a privileges issue with the fediverse pseudo-user.

Also, a couple years back I lost basically all of my gaming clients to Discord.

Travesty. Discord pales in comparison to what forums can do.

So NodeBB and forums in general used to be pretty big in games, but not so much now.

Last one I know of is Sea of Thieves, but they don’t federate.

… yet? 😂

There are comparatively few instances that federate, since we are new to the activitypub game.

I made the decision that if you upgrade to v4, AP is turned off. Install a new instance of NodeBB, and ActivityPub is enabled out of the box.

Side effect of that would be all instances running prior to v4 won’t be federating, but at least there will be no surprises!

Here’s a list, but it’s not listed by topic or genre.

https://nodebb.fediverse.observer/list

Hey, yeah, please tell the Linux Nerds people to turn on federation!

Tell them Julian from NodeBB will help them get started 🤓

Your blogging options with federation are: WordPress, Ghost, and WriteFreely

I suppose, although in that scenario theoretically one could add as:sensitive to mark the status as CW’d? I don’t think CW logic is even run for non-Notes at the moment, though I could be mistaken.

Not necessarily, no. Content warnings were implemented in Mastodon specifically as summary plus sensitive=true. Perhaps not originally, but that is enforced now (all CW’d posts from Mastodon are marked sensitive). Might be Mastodon will CW notes that don’t have sensitive, out of caution, but this doesn’t apply to non-Notes.

So a summary included in a non-Note is not CW’d by Mastodon currently.

Thanks. Yes, this is just how Mastodon renders content from Lemmy and Piefed at the moment.

Mastodon sees something that is not a Note, and says “I will treat it using a fallback mechanism. If it has a title, it is added to the top, I will add the URL back to the site at the bottom. If it has a summary, I will use that as the content”

Note that it does not use content, that’s why there’s no actual content. This is why the link preview also links back to Lemmy, not to the article itself.

nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social can add this to their software, respectively, by populating summary. It can just be a copy of content, or it can be a summarization… or it could be the link to the article… anything goes really.

otter@lemmy.ca perhaps the quote posts are not related but some other changes bundled in that version release are?

Can you share the instance that user was on? It’s worth checking out how their instance sees your post.

Mastodon did improve some non-Note handling characteristics, so it could be related!

Everyone’s hilariously ragging on OP for setting up a federated instance with dubious uptime, and I’m sittin’ here thinking that it just reminds me of me when I was a young kid hacking around with software.

Back then I set up a mediawiki server with very dubious uptime. Was fun 😂

It’s a good approach, it’s exactly how NodeBB operates as well.

We have a FOSS software and we sell managed services for those who don’t have the technical know-how.

Win-win.

Can you not call fetch() to do a HEAD call? Maybe I’m mistaken about it but it should be ok.

CORS is indeed a wrench that gets thrown in when you least expect it…