I’ll elaborate on my thoughts further in my reply below, but I’m keen to hear what everyone thinks of this concept
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@ajsadauskas Take a look at this: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/first-release-of-lemmybb-a-federated-bulletin-board-written-in-rust/2629
@junbird @ajsadauskas@lemmy.ml Yes! That’s the type of thing I’m looking for! Thanks for sharing 😊
@nutomic LemmyBB looks like a very interesting project!
Apart from that The Pavilion cooperative has announced they work on a Discourse forum plugin for the Fediverse. And also I got word from the Flarum maintainer that they have plans to add support (but there’s been silence after that).
Update: Here’s a thread on Flarum’s ongoing work: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31943-federation-extension
The pavilion plugin was promised ages ago though no?
I was hoping discourse would actually integrate it as a first class part of the application but they seem to be shy of it. And with no solid plugin to serve as a proof of concept it doesn’t feel like the issue will be resolved anytime soon.
Furthermore there seems to be a real problem with how to treat identity in the fediverse. I feel like that problem is still unresolved. I hear people talking about did etc but I’m not educated on the matter well enough to really say much about it.
Pavilion had early plans to create a plugin, and applied for a NLnet grant. When that wasn’t accepted they put their plans in the freezer. It is only recently, after The Muskening™ that they picked up on it again.
See this post on the Discourse Meta forum about the plans.
@ajsadauskas@lemmy.ml Across the internet, there’s a host of niche communities on message boards and web forums, using platforms such as phpBB and its various competitors.
Is there scope to get these communities on the Fediverse?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying out Lemmy (lemmy.ml ), which is basically a Reddit-like platform on the Fediverse. (For those reading this on Mastodon, this post is actually a reply to a post on Lemmy, meaning you can read it on Lemmy, on Mastodon, or elsewhere!)
It’s shown me that the concept of a Fediverse -connected discussion forum certainly can work.
So is there scope to either add ActivityPub to any existing message board software platforms?
Alternatively, is there scope to develop a fediverse-connected general purpose message board platform?
Is anyone working on it?
#mastodon #lemmy #fediverse #activitypub #ActivityPubDev #WebDev @tchambers @atomicpoet @LemmyDev #developer #developers #OpenSource
There are around 20 projects doing groups/forums and they’re coming to Mastodon (eventually - not sure what’s holding them back). The only thing that makes a traditional forum different from a group is that the first post usually has a title and Mastodon doesn’t support titles in posts and many social network users have outgrown them. So, like lemmy, you would need to make the starting (topic) post on an instance that not only supports but mandates titles.
Otherwise if you don’t care about titles, use groups. You can post to them from any platform from within your personal timeline. We put all of our project support and development discussions on fediverse groups long ago. But you can use them for anything you want.
> Is anyone working on it?
@ajsadauskas@aus.social
@ajsadauskas@lemmy.ml
Yes. Momentarily on development hiatus, but I develop a federated link aggregator similar to HN, and old reddit: https://brutalinks.tech.
@tchambers @atomicpoet @LemmyDev
@ajsadauskas@aus.social @ajsadauskas@lemmy.ml I saw somewhere that Discourse is maybe planning or starting work on adding ActivityPub support somehow.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/87
@blake @ajsadauskas@aus.social @ajsadauskas@lemmy.ml For one joyous minute I thought you were talking about the Pub!
@ajsadauskas My impression is that people stay on those platforms because they want to. Moving the entire network from those to fediverse one is something they have to decide.
It’s something that surprised me when I looked into #linux development, different groups hardly even use the same kind of medium. E.g. mailing lists, forums, custom bug tracker… Those were chosen for individual reasons that haven’t changed.
The fragmentation goes through the fabric of groups, not just their output.
@bmaxv A number of the most popular platforms (Discourse, bbPress, phpBB, etc) are FOSS.
My thinking is if ActivityPub support were added, at least in theory communities that already use that software could open up discussions on their forums to the Fediverse.
I’m wondering if any of them are/are open to working on it?
@ajsadauskas @bmaxv as someone who frequented these niche forums extensively, i don’t see any reason to connect or federate them. This is done loosely by someone sharing from one to another, which could be to Mastodon. The spécialisation of sites like saxontheweb or electric heaters is the main attraction. Federating them would result in an unwanted dilution IMO.
@randulo @bmaxv True, although I guess if it’s a niche specialist discussion, it would most likely remain a niche specialist discussion on the Fediverse.
The advantages would be that specialists who might not participate directly in the forum could join in some of the conversations, and it would be interoperable with other Fediverse tools (potentially things like PeerTube videos and such).
@randulo @ajsadauskas @bmaxv A nice use case would be to follow certain users or topics across different forums on mastodon.
Allowing users from other servers to post to forums, on the other hand, would certainly be hated.
@mkoubik @ajsadauskas @bmaxv That’s a great point if it were possible. An expert reply to a forum, if done properly, would be appreciated. IOW, value added from someone whith knowledge or experience
https://fedibb.ml
I came here to post that link. Now I don’t have to. :)
@ajsadauskas
omg I have been waiting for the day
I thought the LemmyBB UI was the perfect solution to this. But what I am missing in Lemmy (vs. Reddit) is a root, or an aggregated search for public Lemmy communities. I understand that private groups would have to be excluded (or, if the community should be found, but membership is moderated, then make the address searcheable, but the content access-controlled).
Currently, it seems that I have to search each single public instance from the Lemmy directory manually in order to find and add a community to my personal forum home view (?). I do not see the benefit in this, so I prefer to read and post to Lemmy communities from Hubzilla (I just add them as a connection, or “follow them” in Masto speak). Actually, I can even search Hubzilla’s Zot network for group channels on other instances (like communities), without leaving my own instance. But unfortunately not Lemmy’s AP network. But I cannot do this from Lemmy or LemmyBB, either.
/edit wrong post.
Do you know how this kind of federated community search is implemented in terms of Activitypub?
@nutomic
In case you meant me:
Hubzilla has its own protocol (Zot) and network, but is interoperable with most of the AP network. But the federated search is implemented by searching the public channels on public instances registered in directory servers (i.e. that want to be found), which is implemented only in Hubzilla servers, so AFAIK, AP contacts have to be entered explicitly by their webbie, instead. The directory servers (I am aware of four) are synchronized, so they are redundant.
In (streams), AFAIK this was changed to a more implicit search that browses the instances of your ID’s contacts (and contacts of contacts, to a configurable depths - which makes it more decentral, but also more context-/channel-dependent, and consumes more capacity than browsing a central register).
This search is highly configurable and integrated into the apps’ UI. So you just search from your channel’s interface, and click “add as contact” (which includes group channels => like “subscribe to community”).
Do you by any chance know how Hubzilla or Streams retrieve a list of channels from a given instance? Do they make a request to a specific path or something similar? And do you have a link to these directory servers, to see how they work?
@ajsadauskas Lemmy see!
@nutomic
According to this post, the current (actually five) directory servers are:
https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu
https://hub.libranet.de
https://zapalot.in-eu.net
https://zotsite.net
https://hub.knthost.com
The post also talks about how to set your preferred (primary) directory server in Hubzilla. Actually, I am not aware how they work technically in detail (I am no dev, sorry). The code is available at https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core.
The code for (streams) can be found at https://codeberg.org/streams/streams/src/branch/release.
I trust @mike who already posted above and is the author of both servers can provide details.
Thanks, but unfortunately I cant find any documentation how these directory servers work on the protocol level. I think its a good idea to implement such a feature in Lemmy, but for that I need more details.
@stark@ubuntu:~$ :idle: Yes, but it seems that Lemmy is not inventing LemmyPub, but works mostly fine as far as I can tell from Hubzilla (Well, I am following only shortly before the last update, which was some improvement, so I have no idea about problems before). What I am missing in Lemmy is a federated search for communities, so I do not have to manually crawl each instance for what is already there. Other than that, Lemmy looks pretty good :slight_smile:
https://browse.feddit.de/ For aggregated community browsing - very handy.
@_ed
Thanks, this is pretty much what I was looking for for Lemmy :slight_smile: