not really, no – the assertion is more that discussions should happen in a venue conducive to discussion, which “the fediverse” softwares don’t currently do a good job at. it’s not useful to classify them as “socialhub discussions” vs “activitypub discussions” unless the discussion is meta-relevant to socialhub but not activitypub. federation doesn’t automatically make a conversation better if the effect of federation is to disperse the discussion without being able to view it in aggregate.
do they? i wouldn’t know about them. sometimes i see bits and pieces from when people i follow post certain things, or when someone mentions me and i get a notification. but on the whole, i don’t find many discussions of activitypub from my mastodon account. if i’m discussing activitypub, it tends to happen here, or on github (centralized btw!), or via a messaging app if people ask me questions directly. if i’m on my mastodon account, then i’m checking up on my friends there, who more often than not are posting about things other than activitypub or fedi. if i wanted to discuss activitypub, i shouldn’t have to check dozens of different hashtags or profiles whose existence i might not even be aware of.
it’s worth noting that federation of content is not the only way to achieve this goal. you can instead federate logins, by allowing people to log in using external identities instead of providing more traditional credentials like a password. the much bigger problem right now is that most current fediverse software doesn’t have a concept of threaded discussion; they implicitly reconstruct data however they see fit instead of browsing or consuming canonical representations. of course the swicg forums tf is working to explore improvements in this regard, but that doesn’t change the current reality.
that doesn’t work unless the mastodon instance in question is already aware of the specific actors, of which it will generally not be aware, unless someone else has tried to resolve them directly before.
to do this for the first time, you would need to go to a category page like https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/c/software/nodebb/89 and click the “federation” tab at the top, then you can discover its webfinger address (NodeBB@socialhub.activitypub.rocks), which you can copy-paste into the mastodon search bar and add an @ symbol at the beginning (@NodeBB@socialhub.activitypub.rocks). that allows you to resolve the mastodon profile by clicking the “go to profile @NodeBB@socialhub.activitypub.rocks” button in the tooltip that appears. then you can follow it to get new boosts for everything in the category.
there is sadly no way to load an actual post and reply to it except by loading the thread natively on socialhub, clicking the activitypub logo next to the timestamp of the post, go down to “attributes”, hover over the box that says “Note” (i guess it can also instead say “Article”?), and click that box to copy a URL that you can copy-paste into the mastodon search bar.
idk about anyone else, but that seems like a very convoluted process either way. the ux needs sore improvement compared to just being able to go to socialhub.activitypub.rocks in your actual web browser and log in and browse/post normally. in this case, the insistence on “follows” (receiving new posts instead of browsing old ones) and “profiles” (contextless soup of every post in a category reverse-chronologically instead of contextual views of every post in a thread chronologically) is degrading the ux needlessly. there are several potential ways to address some of these issues (i.e. having various software recognize threads as different from profiles, making threads followable as their own actors, adding support for browsing explicitly maintained resources instead of implicitly reconstructed profiles, and so on), but these require ecosystem alignment between all participants, and ideally also a way to tell which specific protocols are in effect so that you can interact and be understood (“here’s how you need to format your message, where to send it, what you need to include with it, …”). i’m currently trying to organize some writing about these problems in more detail, because i believe we can roundly do better.
"There is sadly no way to load an actual post and reply to it except by loading the thread natively on socialhub, clicking the activitypub logo next to the timestamp of the post, go down to "attributes", hover over the box that says "Note" (i guess it can also instead say "Article"?), and click that box to copy a URL that you can copy-paste into the mastodon search bar."
Oh wow, that is indeed what I was looking for. Thatnks!
Agreed though it's very convoluted, and I'm probably not the only one who wasn't able to discover it on my own ... also on threads I hadn't already been participating in, it just finds the individual post without any context. So certainly better than nothing but still not great.
The sequence of replies following my suggestion about a NodeBB mirror of SH is highly relevant to the Against Fragmentation topic. Would it be possible for an admin to copy them to that topic, or even move them, since they’re OT for FediCon 2025. My apologies to all for not separating this comment into two parts, and posting that suggestion to the Against Fragmentation topic in the first place.
Federation