Testing forum<>forum federation over AP

We’ve drifted a long way from the top of adding Fediseer to the top links, so I’ve replied as a new thread.

Apparently Discourse federation needs be manually turned on for each category. The threads you can’t see in Lemmy may be in categories where this isn’t turned on yet?

This raises the larger issue of a need to do structured testing of federation between different fediverse software. This is something we do to some degree at fediverse.party. It’s also one of many things I had in mind when I set up the Fortitude Testing repo. New testers and other collaboration welcome in both projects!

Yes I’m aware, but this topic is specifically set for lemmy federation as far as I understand.

I agree about thoroughly testing against the various software. But I also understand that expectation that following the apub standard should make this standard, but there’s also many types of federation. Let’s hope this can be improved soon.

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OK, I’m a bit confused. Which topic are we talking about? On the thread this one branched off from, you said;

So I’m commenting on AP forum<>forum federation in general, not just Lemmy<>Lemmy.

I understand this too, but it’s clearly not the reality. There’s been a lot of discussion here recently about why it isn’t and what ought to be done. Eg;

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/a-brief-and-unromantic-history-of-activitypub/

But in the specific case of forum<>forum federation, there are things smooth interop will need at the protocol level that are completely unnecessary in others kinds of AP apps. So they are better defined in a forum/ group FEP, or a set of them for different types of forums/groups. Laying out what a forum app needs to implement on top of vanilla AP to achieve a good UX.

The community topic in this discourse forum is enabled for lemmy-style API federation. Which is why I could find the one thread within it by searching for it on lemmy. However even though I’m subscribed to this topic in lemmy, new posts in it don’t appear in lemmy automatically (i.e. it’s not pushing them to lemmy correctly)

This thread is in the Fediversity category on SH, not the Community category. AP federation has not been turned on for the Fediversity category yet AFAIK.

I am aware, I was talking about the thread which I interacted with in lemmy.

My apologies. It was unclear what you meant by “this topic”. Maybe I’m making a similar mistake in parsing;

Because it reads like you are saying there is one thread in the Community topic. There are many.

I suspect that Lemmy and Discourse are using different styles of AP forum federation. Lemmy developed theirs from scratch to federate one Lemmy to another. The Discourse plug-in was also developed from scratch, targeting Discourse<>Discourse federation. Both with an eye to allowing some level of interop with Mastodon (where most of the fediverse population currently are).

No I meant, I managed to somewhat interact with one thread (among many) via lemmy in the community topic, which topic has lemmy-style apub federation active on itself.

I mean, maybe. I was under the impression the plugin was initially developed with mastodon in mind, and only later expanded into lemmy-style integration. But I don’t know the history. All I know is what doesn’t work right now :slight_smile:

You’d have to ask @angus what the initial target of the Discourse plug-in was. But both Mastodon and Lemmy use ActivityPub for federation, just different ‘dialects’ of it, so to speak. Leading to mismatches like the ones you’ve noticed, when things don’t work as expected. Some of the negotiations over how to improve Discourse<>Lemmy federation are described here;

I know. I’m already in that topic :slight_smile:

This should now federate. At least the newer messages. Or does it work only for new topics?

I can test it with a new post from lemmy if you want

A new post in Fediversity? Yes please!

@angus This issue remains unresolved. I’m still following @fediversity@socialhub.activitypub.rocks from my Mastodon account (@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), but I can’t see any posts more recent than this one from January last year;

It would be great to get forum-to-forum federation 100% working on SocialHub. Then we can focus on working towards the meta-forum vision for fediverse dev discussions discussed in the Against Fragmentation topic.

EDIT: I’ve noticed some other odd stuff here, probably resulting from people @mentioning SH Actors when posting from microposting apps. An example is this post in the Fediverse Report subcategory of Fediversity, which indicates it’s the first of 6 posts. But the others posts are not visible as replies on SH, and I can’t find a way to find a link to the post on the service it was posted on.