Ping @angus, thought it might be useful to you to read the experiences of a bunch of fediverse newbies with a Discourse instance, trying to get their heads around how to use the AP federation features;
There may be a few specific things you can address, like whether posts deleted on a fediverse server are supposed to persist on a Discourse forum hosting the thread they were part of. Or whether or not Followers-Only replies to topics federated from a Discourse forum can be publicly displayed on that forum. If those are not expected behaviour, they may have found bugs.
It may be that post deletes and recognising posting scopes are features that havenāt been implemented yet, in which case Iād suggest making them a high priority. Thereās a subset of the fediverse community who can be very prickly towards devs they perceive as failing to prioritise privacy and consent. They can even get agitated about public posts appearing outside the fediverse (as they understand its boundaries). See the flack BridgyFedās fediverse<>ATmosphere bridge got ,over being opt-out, rather than opt-in on both ends.
Anyway, thanks for the ongoing work to bring Discourse into the fediverse. Hope you enjoy interacting with the cool folks working on bringing more music hosting platforms into the fediverse, in an artist-centric way : )
AFAIK in Mastodon deleted messages donāt be deleted in Discourse. Deletion is restricted action in Discourse. And Discourse isnāt a Mastodon instance. Discourse is using ActivityPub. Different thing.
And every Mastodon user knows, or should know, that deletion is very unreliable. It spreads thru Fediverse or not.
strypey1:
whether or not Followers-Only replies to topics federated from a Discourse forum can be publicly displayed on that forum.
Forum is forum and ActivityPub (practically only Mastodon from Discourse point of view) is its own thing.
By Followers-Only you mean āPublish Post #1 and deliver it to the followers of the Group Actorsā (or normally after 5 mins) for OP? Answer for such topic isnāt going to followers, into global public timeline. It is just matter of which timeline someone sees messages.
It just means it is subscribed feed as normally in Mastodon. Nothing secret.
When someone answers (which happens really rarely because of group actors and how they boosts, but so it works nowadays) to a topic from Mastodon, it is a public message in that forum and in Mastodon, as usual. And if someone from forum answers to that comment, not into topic (thing, that forum users donāt realize) mentioning that Mastodon user, that post is totally public and be federated just normally.
Or did I totally misunderstand your question?
This is different thing and worth of its own topic, but my opinion is that nothing should do or happen just because of some subset wants something, that is beyong normal limit, or they are using theirs own definition. Meaning that nothing above isnāt matter of consent or privacy.
For context; @Jagster is not part of the Discourse dev team according to their profile on meta.discourse, where this comment originated. @jdp23 might be able to explain better than I can why these are T&S issues for fediverse communities.
I posted this topic on the socialhub.activitypub.rocks category for Discourse, which is federated with the forum you are reading it on. When clicking on your profile here, it says;
This user is no longer active.
So no, itās not seen right away for everyone.
This is mostly a developer forum, and my post was directed to the ActivityPub plugin developer by name. Since you replied, it would be easy for others here to assume you are a developer. Just trying to avoid that confusion.
This is mostly a developer forum, and my post was directed to the ActivityPub plugin developer by name. Since you replied, it would be easy for others here to assume you are a developer. Just trying to avoid that confusion.
You assume wrong things, big time. And thatās why you are actually creating confusion. You donāt know how this forum works, do you?
Again:
Support category isnāt only for the team to answer.
If you want to discuss only with the team you should send a PM. Not start a public topic.
The most important part is that you donāt comment topic itsef, at all.
Anyway, this is at the moment unlisted topic and not visible for public forum. But it spreads thru ActivityPub, though.
This is a confusing topic indeed! I am not yet very familiar with ActivityPub but as the new community manager of meta.discourse.org it appears I need to learn! Let me try to do that here.
We unlisted this topic here on meta.discourse.org because there appears to be a bug of some sort, not allowing the first post to be edited. That we think is related to ActivityPub and we've asked @angus to check into it. Let's wait a bit to see how that gets resolved and then we can see what we want to do with this topic here on meta.discourse.org.
@jagster I appreciate your trying to help out here but please take a more polite tone with a person who is not even a member of meta.discourse.org and might not know how things work here. Likewise @strypey1 please be patient with Jagster who is a knowledgeable Discourse user who is just trying to be helpful and wants to help make Discourse better.
@jagster is a member of meta.discourse.org but not a member of socialhub.activitypub.rocks. Meanwhile @strypey1 is a member of socialhub.activitypub.rocks but not a member of meta.discourse.org. So it's understandable that some confusion may arise.
@jagster is a member of meta.discourse.org but not a member of socialhub.activitypub.rocks.
Im actually.</p><p>But Iām and was very pollite, but I donāt do now or never small talk. And if you take another look my tone was totally same than OPās ā with one detail: I answered to OP totally normal way.</p><p>I changed my tone only after when my position came to topic and the expectation was I should not comment because mentions and because Iām not a member of the team (especially when we are in dev-forumā¦). But even then my tone was pollite.</p><p>But this meta is off topic.</p><p>And yet Iām the only one who actually answered, even OP didnt accept it
Thanks for stepping in @tobiaseigen . This is a good learning experience for the context confusion that can arise when using forum federation. Maybe something to consider in a future UX review?
Perhaps there could be stronger visual indicators for when a topic or comment is federated from another forum. It would definitely help if clicking on a remote actorās avatar said that theyāre based on another forum, rather than āThis user is no longer activeā.
@jagster My apologies for any confusion. The purpose of my initial comment was not to discount your opinion, but to add context for the benefit of anyone seeing it on SocialHub. Iām sure youāre well known over there on Meta : )
It is intentional that posts from other forums cannot be edited by folks on this (i.e. a different) forum. That is normal in ActivityPub (e.g. an admin of one Mastodon instance can't edit posts from another Mastodon instance). There's basic principles of ownership and control at work here. Admins on meta are not admins everywhere. By default, edits to an activitypub post are federated everywhere.
Danyl, thanks for the feedback. We'll think on it some more and incorporate it into upcoming work. We're also already discussing the confusion that arose from this topic and will likely be making some more documentation and support content as a result soon
Thanks, Angus! That all makes sense now. There is no bug in the fact that admins here on meta.discourse.org can't edit the posts from other forums. I've listed this topic again.
How do you "claim" the user associated with the actor from another site? I created an account on socialhub but my username was not available. So now I'm tobiaseigen1 there which is sad.
Iām confused by the question. But then you were probably equally confused by mine Because I hadnāt think through which forum admin action was needed on when I asked it. To clarify;
This is my account here, which is coming through on Meta as āStrypey1ā. Because I already have an account on Meta, set up to pitch AP federation to the Discourse devs with @aschrijver. @tobiaseigen is merging Strypey and Strypey1 at that end (thanks Tobias!), so AFAIK itās all being sorted. Thanks for checking
So what is the plan for this topic? It does not feel like a support topic but is in the support category on meta.discourse.org. Is there anything in particular remaining to be done here now that weāve all learned how activitypub works between meta.discourse.org and socialhub? Maybe we move it to the community category, where we talk about community management?
Iām heading out on leave today for a couple weeks, and when I get back I will talk with colleagues and meta.discourse.org members about how we want to use activitypub on meta going forward. I will also try to set up activitypub on some of my personal sites so I can learn more about how it works in practice and understand the feedback about how it might be improved.
Itās a pretty neat feature and I am super impressed by what folks are doing with federation across lots of different platforms of which Discourse is just one! But there are some confusing aspects that this topic illustrates, like how do members of a site know and understand what is happening when they participate in a topic that is federated. We have to find a way to communicate this directly in the interface in a way that makes sense to anybody using it. It will be hard.
Thanks but there was nothing to edit. A moderator on meta.discourse.org just thought it was odd that it could not be edited and thought it was a bug. It also read like it was not intended to be public in the support category. Turns out that was because it was federated from socialhub which our moderators arenāt all familiar with.
Over here on SocialHub, itās just a general category for the Discourse software (Software > Discourse), not specifically for support requests. It seems like whoever set up the federation/linking did not consider this.
I would propose that meta.discourse.org unlink the https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/c/software/discourse/24 category from their āSupportā category. It would probably make sense to link it to something more general.
Oh, that is interesting. It was going to āuncategorizedā and one of our regulars moved it to āsupportā. We donāt really use the uncategorized category on meta for anything but could move it to āgeneralā. Thanks for that suggestion.
Iād like to test this out with my account on meta.discourse.org, which is currently not claimed yet. I currently have a tobiaseigen1 staged account on meta now associated with my socialhub account, and would like to claim it from my tobiaseigen account on meta. Via my activitypub prefs, I choose āDiscourseā as type but what do I choose for domain? If I choose socialhub.activitypub.rocks I get an error and no further guidance.
Topics started on the Discourse category on SH are most likely to be of interest to AP-plugin devs like @angus . If there is a category on Meta for the AP-plugin, I would have our Discourse category synced with that.
Because I hadnāt think through which forum admin action was needed on when I asked it. To clarify;
