One thing I’m noticing is that people intuitively feel that if they can’t find a post on a Mastodon server somewhere it’s not “in the fediverse”. This is not a dig at you, more of an observation about some of the feedback I’ve been getting about the Discourse plugin. For example
(i.e. it seems to be surprising to users that if no-one is following their category nothing gets “published”, i.e. nothing appears on any Mastodon server anywhere)
I understand that intuition, however it’s perhaps something we want to challenge a bit. Partly for technical reasons, and partly for “shifting the paradigm” as it were. Technically speaking being “on the fediverse” essentially means one of two things:
A “local” Actor sends content to a “remote” Actor. For example, if someone on Mastodon is following this category posts from this category will appear on the Mastodon server of that actor. Your crag.social account was the only actor following this category when this topic was created, so the only Mastodon server this topic will appear on is crag.social:
I would argue that 2 is just as important as 1 as it corresponds with people’s intuitions, i.e. if I can see someone (i.e. an actor profile) I should also see what they’ve said publicly. This is part of the reason I’ve already added outbox import support to the Discourse plugin (you can currently do it via a rake task and it’ll be exposed to the client soon). Mastodon feels a bit incomplete to me in this respect.
More broadly, I think we don’t want to be too beholden to what Mastodon supports or doesn’t support. Forums are now also part of the fediverse, so the direct answer to your inquiry about this specific post is “here”. And when we get the link with this category and community.nodebb.org up and running, it’ll exist equally there too
Ha ha, yes while technically correct that’s not what I meant. Apologies.
I mean, “fetchable on-demand via another Fediverse instance”. I wasn’t able to retrieve the Note via the public URL. If there’s a specific ID I was to use, it wasn’t readily apparent, that’s all.
For example, if you paste this URL into a client that supports note retrieval, it will show up.
Specifically since we don’t have mirroring working between our respective categories, I wanted to manually trigger the backfill on the NodeBB side.
Ah found it after I boosted it from crag.social, which got picked up by the NodeBB Community, and then I was able to inspect the received object to find the id https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/object/1899f65c062200daec50a4c89ed76dc9
Interesting to note that it doesn’t contain the full post content.
@trwnh@mastodon.social I proposed an agenda item for a brief report on the (in-progress) FEP-8899, but it's entirely up to you whether you would like to present one or not.
This could be a good opportunity to get some real-time feedback.
I looked into the federation between Lemmy and Discourse, NodeBB just now and discovered some parsing issues. Have a look at the PRs and test files for Discourse and for NodeBB. With these changes at least basic object fetching should work in the next Lemmy version.
We will have to see if activities can be exchanged successfully. In that regard it would also be helpful if you can send me some example json for different activities sent by your projects, to ensure Lemmy can parse them.
@nutomic btw, if you like we can make this category follow a Lemmy actor. Then you could contribute to the async work here from Lemmy
Likewise for any other implementer. Send me a relevant actor for this (or @swicg-threadiverse-wg@community.nodebb.org) to follow and you can contribute here from your own platform.
Why should the category follow a Lemmy actor? That seems backwards, the way it works on Lemmy is that a user follows the community, fetches the post and can then send replies.
Yup, both would be necessary. The point of this category following a Lemmy actor would be for you to create new topics / threads via Lemmy. But yes, you will also need to follow from the Lemmy end of things if you wanted to contribute entirely from Lemmy. Anyway, up to you.
That still sounds strange, in Lemmy I can create a topic in a community with a Create activity which references the community in to. Lemmy communities cant even follow anyone.
So this sends the Activity to the community in to right? For a Discourse Actor to accept an activity from an Actor they need to be following that Actor.
So basically a form of federation whitelist, interesting. You can follow my lemmy.ml account then, but anyway we have to wait for the next Lemmy release for the federation to work.
@nutomic@socialhub.activitypub.rocks, I suppose there's no specific need for category syncing (that's what NodeBB would call it), or community syncing (as per Lemmy parlance). It's something that @angus@socialhub.activitypub.rocks implemented first and had some minor utility between our respective forums.
Users can follow communities/categories and other users, that'd be the basic expectation.
What group federation protocol Discourse and NodeBB are using, FEP-400e, FEP-1b12, or something else?
Has there been any discussion about convergence?
@macgirvin recently published a specification titled Conversation Containers, which is based on FEP-400e. I think it is very interesting because it seems to solve many problems at once: different conversation models, moderation, public groups, private groups.
Yes, Angus and I had to work through a couple issues on my end (he had a stricter interpretation cavage-12 and the ActivityPub spec, while I… did not )
We’ve achieved one-way syncing, working on the other half now.
(right here)
So we can follow the ActivityPub category in 
)