Skip Navigation

Posts
51
Comments
269
Joined
13 yr. ago

Co-Founder (NodeBB) | Husband 🤷‍♂️ and Dad 🙉 to three | Rock Climber 🧗‍♂️ | Foodie 🥙 | Conductor 🎵 | Saxophonist 🎷

✅ Small teams craft better code.🇨🇦 Made in Canada🗨️ Federating NodeBB with funding from NLNet ♥️🇪🇺

  • > Also there may be (?) a new workflow involving an Accept from the moderators of the destination audience.

    Thanks for calling that out, that's a legitimate use case that I would not have anticipated.

  • Based on the replies received, it does sound like at present that if cross-posting is a consideration, it is something done locally, and not something that is explicitly declared when federating outward or retrieved via AP.

    There are also multiple definitions of cross-posting:

    1. Multiple, disparate topics sharing the same attachment url (PieFed)
    2. Author targeting multiple audiences
    3. Non-author sharing object to additional audiences

    One of those is really not like the other, which does complicate things somewhat. Thankfully, it does seem like that the way PieFed handles it, is local to the instance.

    A good first step might be to narrow down the definition of cross-posting—at least from a protocol level—to a combination of the latter two:

    > "A user (which may or may not be the object author) sharing an object to additional audiences"

    Of course, this also happens to be what I'm looking for: the association of an as:announce activity with an as:target pointing to an as:Group actor.

    Would this be of interest to anybody here? The fallback mechanism is to just treat the announce as usual.

  • @scott@loves.tech how does Hubzilla communicate this to other 'za instances?

    Something like a boolean for whether the public can post would take you part of the way there.

  • Hmm... considering that Piefed cross-posts are entirely separate posts, then if the original is edited, then the modification is not carried over to the cross-posted post, correct?

    I'm thinking that for NodeBB we could continue to have cross-posts reference the canonical topic. They'd simply be part of a separate audience as well.

    Whether this is local-only or not, I am not sure yet. Perhaps for federation purposes we'd still report the original category (if there is one) under audience

  • @rimu@piefed.social excellent... yes this is the kind of difference I'd love to explore and potentially put together an FEP for...

  • @mario@hub.somaton.com since Hubzilla posts (incl. yours) are making it in fine I'm assuming this is only for the "forum" feature?

  • @scott@loves.tech Hubzilla is formatting its Notes in a manner I wasn't expecting.

    • The group actor is the attributedTo, which is not possible in NodeBB
    • The note itself is not addressed to the group actor, only its followers collection
    • There is no way to discern without parsing the note content itself who authored the original note.

    So at present while I would be able to retrieve the note, without a proper backreference to the group actor, I don't think I can slot it correctly.

    Not sure why the received activity is returning a 403, as well.

  • @scott@loves.tech can you share an example of a group actor from Hubzilla? Would be interesting to see how that's handled. Likely it wouldn't work properly because categories in NodeBB don't author posts.

    Do your group actors send creates on behalf of regular users? That might work ok.

    Lastly, there's no requirement that a NodeBB category be mentioned. It only needs to be addressed. A mention is the easiest way to do that because addressing is abstracted out of the Mastodon UI.

    But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you're able to change addressing based on where you create the post.

  • Hastags

    Jump
  • @CWSmith hashtags in NodeBB are only relevant at the topic level — that's just how it was designed years ago.

    You'll note that on microblogs, tags can be added on any post. While we show them, we don't consume or index them unless they are the original post.

    When you use tags in NodeBB, they are federated outward with the original post.

    Hope that helps!

  • @AltCode said in Forum specific UX for remote categories: > My thinking was that all the remote categories you follow are listed in your /world page

    That might get a little hairy if you follow a lot of categories.

    Right now posts from any categories you follow would still show up in your world feed. If you follow a remote category, you would essentially be "tracking" the category, in NodeBB parlance. New topics and posts would show up in your /unread and /recent. If you "watch" the category, then you'll be notified of every new topic.

  • @Kichae my fear is that adding in the ability for users to customize the forum index would dilute the importance of local categories.

    I'm always a big supporter of community building, and while I am very appreciative of the network effects of activitypub, there is the other local community building side that I would want to keep top of mind as well.

  • @Kichae I worked on this for most of this week. You can follow along with that effort here:

    https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13255

    How exactly to integrate categories into the NodeBB UX is an interesting question. It's one thing to be able to render a remote as:Group actor as a category, and I think we'd want it to be searchable as well (otherwise how would you find them?)

    That's the baseline.

    Being able to customize your /world page with a selection of subcategories is really interesting... I am not sure I'd want to allow users to customize the /categories page, so /world seems like a nice place for it.

    Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

  • @eeeee a forum is usually structured around a common theme, yes. For example, community.nodebb.org is centred around support/discussion for NodeBB.

    However, nothing stops someone from creating a general-interest forum, and that's why I prefer to think of NodeBB categories as like Lemmy communities.

    You are correct in that Mastodon does not have the concept of categories. In fact that have not much concept of organization of content outside of reply-trees, and that is partly by design and partly by the constraints from the microblogging style.

  • @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de okay :+1:

    Apologies for not mentioning you up top. I did not know you were the maintainer for mbin, but now I do! :smile:

  • @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de ah that's good to know.

    Perhaps the solution is to use audience if explicitly defined, then fall back to to/cc otherwise.

  • @bh4-tech might be not working because I did not expect urls. Can you try a handle like dansup@mastodon.social?