Federation and "Who's Online" discourse plugin

Software Discourse
1

@angus I noticed that this post of yours, federated from meta.discourse.org, showed an online status (via the Who’s Online plugin installed at SocialHub) with the same account name on SocialHub and in the heading of the forum:

Snapshot of Angus' avatar showing a green "seen in last 5 minutes" circle
Snapshot of Angus' avatar showing a green "seen in last 5 minutes" circle1064×151 19.4 KB

While this level of integration is great, it raises a couple of questions:

  • Were you online on SocialHub or on Discourse Meta? Or on another forum that is being federated with? My expectation of how this should work, is that you were indeed viewing SocialHub in the last 5 minutes, and that your presence on other forums is not indicated via the Who’s Online plugin at SocialHub.
2

Great question! The immediate answer is that I think I was online on both platforms. I tend to watch how things federate between the two.

As to the normative question, the who’s online plugin relies requires a user session to register a user as “online”, not just any activity associated with the user’s record.

That is correct. I would note that the obverse would not be possible, via ActivityPub at least.

1 Like