Can you hear me Fediverse?

how · September 27, 2023, 1:42pm

Did you associate your #SocialHub account with your fediverse account yet?

If yes, then you may reply to this announcement directly from the Fediverse. #Exciting times!

how · September 27, 2023, 2:35pm

Hmmm… This should have appeared in my feed by now, but the error log is empty. Well, not so, but it’s not saying anything about failing to publish.

erlend_sh · October 3, 2023, 6:02pm

What account should I be following to see this announcement? @fediverse@socialhub.activitypub.rocks ? It appears empty on Mastodon (Ivory).

And is there a link of this fediverse post that I can go directly to?

aschrijver · October 4, 2023, 6:50am

@angus maybe there should be an easier way to find the actor to follow in the Discourse UI. Like having both the post URL and actor URL in dialog that pops up when clicking the AP icon at the top of this thread…

ActivityPub dialog only shows informative notification, but no URL's

how · October 4, 2023, 7:31am

I think I published an Article so it is not supposed to appear on Mastodon, which is quite a shame actually. Something like using an excerpt as a Note to supplement the article would be awesome, but then it would require using #c2s wouldn’t it, since it would address a single server-type that does only support a Note.

Is there a way for ActivityPub announces to specify that they can have multiple forms? (I.e., a single Create activity would let others choose whether they want to take it as a Note, Article, or something else.) – I would guess that the Activity should send a Collection.

P.S.: I reverted to sending Notes, because most people use Mastodon, which is quite a downer since we’re supposed to have interoperability and federation. We’re not there yet.

angus · October 6, 2023, 1:53am

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll take it into account.

Indeed, I think there move there is to lobby mastodon to implement a version of this suggestion

github.com/mastodon/mastodon

Always show object `content`, regardless of object `type`, if `mediaType` is supported

opened 01:02PM - 12 Mar 23 UTC

Oblomov

activitypub

### Pitch Currently, Mastodon separates ActivityPub objects between “supported”… and “converted”, based on object type. Converted objects will only display a title, spoiler text and URL. This is the case even if the object has a `content` that could be handled no differently than the Note type. A better approach would be to map object properties to the internal model whenever that makes sense, regardless of the object type. This would mean mapping the title & summary to the spoiler text, the (sanitized) content to the text (if supported, i.e. if its `mediaType` is the default `text/html` or other supported format), etc. ### Motivation The choice to reduce non-supported types to “title + link” even when content or other compatible attributes are present has no apparent motivation, and leads to issues ranging from the one described in #8892 or #19357 to poor user experience both for Mastodon users and for users of other federate platforms that wish to be more accessible to Mastodon users. Classic example is the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress recommending to use `Note` instead of `Article` as AP object type, even though `Article` would be the more sensible choice, because otherwise Mastodon followers won't be able to see the post content. Arguably, PixelFed's choice to use `Note` as object type is due to the same reasons. I know that at least for `Article`s the official rationale behind the choice is that Mastodon is intended for short messages only, but the fact that Mastodon accepts the exact same content when it's presented as `Note` instead of an `Article` (or anything else), the rationale seems ultimately pretty weak, and the _practical_ effect is that other platforms end up abusing the `Note` type to improve the Mastodon users' experience and avoid being relegated to “title and link” on the dominant platform. So, if there isn't a stronger rationale than “Mastodon is supposed to be for short messages only” (that ship has long sailed), I think it would be better for the entire ecosystem if object attributes were mapped to equivalent status attributes whenever possible, independently from the object type.

how · December 17, 2023, 7:23pm

@wakest (@liaizon@wake.st) and myself did not receive any updates from both @fediverse@socialhub.activitypub.rocks nor @feps@socialhub.activitypub.rocks for… some time.

I thought it was because of the article vs. note difference, but it is not. Here are screenshots of both settings (sorry, no alt text):

angus · December 24, 2023, 9:43am

Are you still having issues on the latest version of the plugin? If so can you share some of the ActivityPub logs of SocialHub?

angus · March 4, 2024, 9:55am

6 posts were merged into an existing topic: Adding federation support to Discourse

how · February 27, 2024, 10:48am

The latest discourse-activitypub plugin version is up. It should address our lost messages…

aschrijver · February 29, 2024, 8:22am

(Moved from The Social Web Community Group in the W3)

Pinging @angus and @how regarding the Discourse AP plugin. How does this work? Laurens Hof of Fediverse Report also mentioned being followed by Fediversity from this forum and confused what that meant:

A whole range of other topics were auto-created in Fediverse Futures category, and I think it is undesirable the way that is polluting the forum rn with rather arbitrary posts.

(Note how moving this post brings along the ActivityPub icon in this thread, just FYI)

aschrijver · February 29, 2024, 4:50pm

For the time being I deactivated ActivityPub in Fediverse Futures and unlisted all auto-created topics:

andypiper · February 29, 2024, 4:57pm

I think deactivating it for now is a good idea until it is more clear what is going on here. My understanding of the AP plugin for Discourse is / was that it was not creating posts from other platforms, so I am curious to learn what happened in this case.

I’ll have to experiment on a test setup somewhere, out of curiosity!

how · March 1, 2024, 8:27am

Oh, at least something started! This is very good!

angus · March 1, 2024, 3:21pm

Hey guys, you can read an overview of what the plugin does here.

This is what happened:

While ActivityPub was enabled here, this category was following fediversereport.
fediversereport boosted the posts that appeared in this category.

If you follow someone on Mastodon you’ll get the notes they boost posted to your inbox (by Mastodon). The ActivityPub plugin converts notes that are not in reply to other notes into new topics. Note that the atrocious title parsing you’re seeing here (i.e. turning toots into Discourse titles) is currently being worked on as part of “Phase 4”

Phase 4 Spec

Identity

Add Discourse to Discourse user account linking, i.e. associate a staged user with your account by authorising with the Discourse instance the staged user’s actor is from.

Import

Add a per-actor action in the “Followed” UI to import previously published activities of the Followed actor. (reference)
- This is done by GETing prior activities from the Actor’s Outbox.
- For Mastodon Actors this means importing “First Posts” (i.e. not replies) of the Actor.
- For Discourse Group Actors (Categories (and maybe tags)) this will mean importing all previous announcements of activities in that group’s outbox.
Handle when the incoming activity actor is a Group (reference).
Handle processing Full Topic replies when the instance is private (reference).

Publish

Add “Schedule Publish” support for posts in Full Topics and topics themselves (reference).
Add a rake task to schedule publication of topics by category id or list of topic ids.
Add Tag actors (reference)
- publish a topic if they have an AP-enabled tag when they’re posted.
- permit “schedule publish” if an AP-enabled tag is added later.

Administration

Consolidate Tag and Category administration in a dedicated ActivityPub admin panel.

Content

Improve Note excerpt and title parsing (reference)
Improve non-latin username support (reference)

Also note that the recent issue some have been having with connecting Mastodon with Discourse is currently being worked on. It may be connected with some recent updates to Mastodon.

You may want to try a Discourse to Discourse federation scenario in the meantime which has no connection issues, no title parsing issues, and is perhaps a bit more apposite for a forum, i.e. you’re less likely to get random topics when someone boosts a toot.

@how @aschrijver I’d urge a Discourse to Discourse federation test here. Full Mastodon <> Discourse federation is always going to be a bit awkward as they’re inherently different (social media v forum).

how · March 1, 2024, 5:52pm

Since I’m in the middle of debugging Go TALER! - TALER ICH, maybe we can try them following each other. There is @GoTALER@ich.taler.net.

aschrijver · March 2, 2024, 10:00am

Having read the top post on Meta again, it is unclear to me how this category managed to follow fediversereport. Is that something you or @how did? I do not see a UI for following fedi accounts by a category.

angus · March 2, 2024, 12:10pm

An admin here would have had to follow that actor like so:

I don’t know who did. Perhaps the plugin will add an audit trail in the future.

how1 · March 2, 2024, 12:28pm

angus:

Is that something you or @how did?

Yes, I did that some time ago to enable mirroring the Fediverse Report to the SocialHub. When the boosts came in @aschrijver suspended @fediversity@socialhub.activitypub.rocks. Then I unfollowed the FR account before reactivating ActivityPub federation.

Discuss this on our forum.

how1 · March 2, 2024, 12:31pm

I guess it would be useful to be able to avoid boosts and only accept new notes from the followed account. This way we can have federated topics without too much noise. Relaying boosts should be optional.

Discuss this on our forum.