Yes, forum platforms too (incl #nodebb of course).
I do get the (very vague) impression discourse is focusing on integrating well with masto to a good extent and so might not integrate too well with the other Reddit/forum platforms. If true, that might be a good enough reason to start with another base. OTOH, it’s a familiar platform to many devs so adapting it for stackoverflow like use could go well right?
Post from @rabble on why he's chosen to use #Nostr and not #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. He makes some compelling points. Personally I am not too worried about the server admin parts of his argument (I have enough control, even if I don't control the server), but I agree that this isn't ideal:
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?
Seeing #nodeBB#ActivityPub implementation in action here is just really cool. Especially since I first saw the post on my masto feed, and then you open it up in the original source and you're suddenly on a forum
(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:
Choosing Discord or Matrix as the official way to get support is frustrating. There's really good information jammed in there, but finding it is next to impossible. The people are nice, so you can't be mad at that.
Why not use GitHub Issues or Discourse or NodeBB or just about anything else that gives just the tiniest bit of structure and advanced search?!
We need a NodeBB bot that sweeps up questions and answers in these channels and creates forum threads.
@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?
Has anyone patched either Mastodon or Lemmy so that Lemmy's posts display the whole article in your Mastodon feed yet? At this point it seems like it might be as "simple" as changing the post type from "article" to "note" since Mastodon is now able to display a good amount of formatting and stuff inline #fediverse#ActivityPub
@liaizon as you alluded to in your reply, WP gets around this by assuming type as:Note which I disagree with from a protocol fragmentation standpoint. It implicitly acknowledges Mastodon as the dominant #ActivityPub player with clout to change the behaviour of others, and I stand against it.
#nodebb will send type as:Page (like #lemmy and #kbin), and we will work with @article_interop (and hopefully @pfefferle) to encourage Mastodon to handle it properly by modelling the appropriate behaviour.
@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.
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 👏.
The fact of the matter is, a lot of popular #fediverse software is rather new, and that's super exciting, but also means some of the software is rather green and not battle tested.
#nodebb went through its own growing pains, so I feel like there are some lessons that can be learned from outside orgs looking to join #ActivityPub devel.
I'm not saying we're perfect, but if we can help soften some of those growing pains for all of #fedi then 👍
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 ...
@AltCode That's a good question. At this time I can only try to provide as much linkage and context as I can, and it's up to individual implementors to handle.
In #nodebb's case, each post will have an inReplyTo that points to its direct reply. OP (the root level post) does not have an inReplyTo.
All posts send audience which points to the TOPIC. Each topic (the Page object) sends audience which points to the category.
#FEP 1b12 leaves no room for topic references in replies 🫤
Finally figured out why #nodebb posts weren't queryable via Mastodon, turns out it does Content-Type checking, and I was inadvertently breaking #ActivityPub spec by sending in application/json when I should've been sending in "application/activity+json" or 'application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"'
Latter doesn't play nicely with express, so using the former and all's well!
Full credit to @bouncepaw who gave me key to figuring it out! 🏅
@Rainer are you sold on Mastodon? One thing to know about Mastodon is that it's not ideal for creating close-knit communities. Each Mastodon server is like a window to the fediverse, but local-only posts is not well supported.
Other forks like Glitch (or even #nodebb once it federates) would be a better bet.
I discovered #NodeBB via Cloudron 2 years ago. I am very happy with and highly recommend both products.
And can recommend the actual Cloudron forums for not only the excellent support by staff that goes above & beyond, but also the valuable input from users when it comes to discovery and filtering for quality apps.
Ideas to build a federated StackExchange alternative ( ioc.exchange )
Codeberg was asking about this. The linked toot by a commenter points to :...