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 Fortitute 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.
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;
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.
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
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;
