Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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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.
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Heckin' yeah it is. :sunglasses:
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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.
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@otters_raft I suggested on a few forums that I belong to that using the plugin might be useful and federating content would be a good idea - What I got back was fairly negative feedback - e.g people thought it would cause people who don't have accounts on the relevant forum being able to spam the forum and get around repuation requirements (not true I understand) - but also a kind of - query why federation would be useful - with an assumption people would just come to the forums and monitor them directly.
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Thank you for the detailed explanation, that makes sense :)
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Do you see any content on that page? I'm looking at !events@forum.fedimins.net but I don't see anything except the title and icon
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Discourse decided to do its thread context in a way that's currently incompatible with projects like Mbin or Lemmy. Those expect threads to be represented by some kind of post (Page, Article, Image, etc objects), while Discourse decided to use an OrderedCollection, with the first item being the opening post.
Even if Lemmy decided to add support for OrderedCollection threads, there's another issue though: the barrier for initial federation is too high. Discourse only gives you the fediverse handle of its categories, but to federate them in, you need their JSON-LD URL, not the handle. And Discourse decided to use separate URLs for its HTML and JSON-LD pages, with no way to derive the latter from the former. So to initiate federation with a Discourse category, you have to manually do a WebFInger query to get its URL to then give it to your instance. I think most people probably fail this hurdle, either out of laziness or lack of know-how.
Also, I don't know about Lemmy, but the Mbin instance I'm using seems incapable of processing Discourse categories anyway. Not sure why that is.
That means Lemmy is entirely reliant on Discourse users replying to posts that are visible to Lemmy, similar to Lemmy-Mastodon interaction. But with less users, hence less overall interaction frequency.
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@Neko0001 bonjour!
