Making more space for long-lasting discussions in #Fediversity

Hi @laurens , love your work, and much respect for your ability to keep it up week after week. Both @deadsuperhero and I have had aspirations to create a fediverse equivalent to This Week in Matrix, but neither of us have had the spoons to pull it off. You OTOH not only managed that, but at the same time, you’re also doing the BlueSky equivalent.

With all that said, and with the greatest of love and respect, you’re kind of flooding the channel by posting every edition of both newsletters as new threads. I can think of a couple of solutions to this;

  • Have one thread for Last Week in Fediverse, and one for Last Week in the ATmosphere. Post each edition as a new reply in that thread.
  • Have the admins set up a separate News category for posting content like this as individuals threads.

Thoughts?

2 Likes

Hey, thank you, that’s really nice to hear!

Regarding the many threads: I totally understand and agree, but it is something I cannot control sadly. It happens because the SocialHub forum follows my WordPress account, which makes it so that every time I publish a post on my website it automatically gets crossposted on SocialHub.

@how has control over this, he’ll have to unfollow FR from the SocialHub account somewhere. I just checked if I can remove a follower from my WordPress account, but I dont think the ActivityPub plugin has an interface that allows me to interact with my followers in such a way.

I do not think that the posts flood the channel. Two topics a week that land neatly in Fediverse Report subcategory. A top post and opportunity to discuss it below is a kind of ‘content pattern’ that works well in Discourse, whereas replying in a single flat topic would be messy. Other than that, as @laurens indicates, the subcategory is federation. Federation was one of most requested features in a quest to become “fedi devhub that is also part of the fedi”. SocialHub is an alpha test forum for @angus ActivityPub plugin releases.

Ah, I see. So given the extra context provided by @aschrijver , I wonder if there’s a way to get the threads to appear in their own subcategory, but not in the main list of threads in the Fediversity category?

Have a look at the list of threads in the Fediversity category. The vast majority of them are either the Fediverse report or the ATmophere report. YMMV but in my book that’s flooding the channel. It makes it very hard to browse actual discussions taking place in the category.

Just select the category without subcategories: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/c/fediversity/10/none

Other than that you can also rephrase that Fediversity is quiet, so 2 threads a week stands out. Suppose a 100 topics were posted a week. Fediverse Report would no longer flood the channel then, or in the same definition every topic floods the category wrt topics that were there before. :smiley:

How do we make this the default?

Beware of valuing quantity of threads over quality of discussions.

I am not doing anything like that… suppose there was just a way more popular forum, and you might get these numbers. Though 100 just picked as example. :slight_smile:

Dunno if that unfiltered category can be made the default. Don’t think so.

If not, then either;

  • there needs to be a separate category for @laurens ’ reports, where people who want to comment on them on SH (rather than elsewhere in the fediverse) can do so
  • there needs to be a separate category for the fediverse support network coordinating that @JoinFediverseWiki and I and others want to do

I’m fine with either option. I just need clarity on which option we’re going with, and help from @how or another admin to action whichever is the consensus.

1 Like

@laurens if you tagged “Last Week in the Fediverse” with “ActivityPub” could we follow that instead? Right now we’re mirroring the mailing list, but if we could follow an AP Actor that would probably make things easier.

I changed the “Number of featured topics on parent category’s page” to 1, made the category color stand out, and changed the default topic order to Top instead of Latest in Fediversity.

Would that solve the issue @strypey?

this should already be possible, I tag all my fedi posts with fediverse and bluesky/atmosphere posts with bluesky

2 Likes

Hmmm, I posted this question because I saw indeed, the bluesky tag, but I couldn’t find the fediverse tag.

Can you please pass me the fediverse tag actor URL?