Can you hear me Fediverse?

Fediversity Fediverse Futures
21

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

This is what happened:

  1. While ActivityPub was enabled here, this category was following fediversereport.
  2. 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).

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