@tallship @julian

>Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.

It is a Note. I think this is a good example of a post which is best viewed on the original site.

@Julian yeah that's a good point - I think tag would work but I always got the impression that they were more of a micro-level part of a specific piece of content vs. macro-level (being the place they're being discussed in). context would be set at the forum level (whatever the forum's owner specified) whereas tags might be decided by the user. So in that sense, context would more about origination of a post.

Example might be something like this -

{ id: "https://yuforium.com/forums/cars", type: "Service", name: "Example Forum About Cars", context: "https://another-instance.org/topic/cars" }

Where a POST to that forum's outbox with a Note would result in that note's context defaulting to the one set to the forum. Posting with another context would result in an error. This makes things a little different than a tag which is what would be user specified. In that sense, context is more about where the post was created, vs. what it was created about. In a federated system, where could be an authoritative entity that encompasses multiple instances and is dereferenceable, or where could be defined as a UUID and be completely unauthoritative and ephemeral.

Given that it's more about the origination of the post, I would agree that the term "Community" is better in this case to define what context relates (instead of "Topic") so in the example, context could be switched to https://another-instance.org/community/cars.

It's been a while since I wrote that up, and at the time I was considering using "Community" as the terminology for a context so I might update that soon (especially with "Topic" being a frequently used convention in forums meaning something totally different).

In the Activity Streams docs, the one part about context that got my attention was this - "An example could be all activities relating to a common project or event", meaning that context exists outside of the scope of what a thread would be, and is more indicative of a forum level or federation setting vs. the contents (objects, activities, etc.) of a single thread.

Nathan Fillion Speechless GIF

Hello Everyone 👋!

Today we are releasing NodeBB 3.8.0. Please read below for all the changes in this release.

Moderation Improvements 🔨

We made some improvements on the user account info page. Namely:

Unmutes and Unbans will show up in the user history. If the account is flagged it will show up in the "Latest Flags" section. Moderation notes are editable. Username & email history will show who made the change.

cfe7c601-f49e-4f16-8341-00ca5dbd0b5e-image.png

User/Group filter on admin events page 📅

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Events in the admin page can be filtered by a single user or a group of users.

Field selector for user export 👥

export-user-fields.png

Exporting a list of users in the acp now let's you select which fields to include in the export.

Docker improvements 🐋

Thanks to more work by @oplik0 we have more improvements to our docker setup, full PR https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/pull/12335

Bug fixes & Misc 🐛

As usual there are plenty of bug fixes in this release.

Full list of closed issues.

Let us know if you run into any issues in our support thread.

@[email protected]

Oh, thank you very much! Sentiments such as yours are what inspires many toward this endeavor.

Just so folks don't actually misconstrue my sometimes seemingly unfair characterizations of masto itself, I do point out in a few pinned posts that it's a quite stable and capable platform, notwithstanding other feature based shortcomings and the huge footprint (in terms of systems resources) it requires to run.

The other main gripe that I personally have is that the group behind masto itself have continuously attempted to brand it as the end-all be-all of the Fediverse (obviously patently false) by virtue of um.... not sharing the wealth of the huge diaspora of available alternatives, and also their tendency to market and fulfill its destiny as yet another monolithic silo.

Truth be told, when compared with other Fediverse platforms, most are built with the intention of being able to run on pretty much any UNIX machine with limited resources effectively, especially considering smolweb and single user self-hosted philosophies; masto, on the other hand, doesn't even really statistically come into its own (with respect to the huge amount of systems resources it requires, comparatively) until about the 20,000 user mark - they don't tout these specs much anymore, it's not really conducive to their mission, but simply reviewing the data at Fedivese.Observer here reveals that this particular instance (their flagship instance), has a total of more than 1.9 million users ("total_users": 1948782, as of this writing).

I wanted to offer this information on my take on things because I'm about to refer you to a resource that is really, really good, but it's also one that I won't normally recommend to people because IMO it tends to either glorify or focus way too much on the masto brand itself. Truth be told, it is a very excellent resource to learn about the Fediverse itself if you can get past all the masto brown-nosing.

https://Fedi.Tips - operated by https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips who you can also follow from your own Fediverse account 🙂

Again, thanks for the positive encouragement, despite my sometimes abrasive presentation 🙂

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #ActivityPub

⛵

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@[email protected] right. I think functionally I'll never encounter a Delete, check the origin, and find that the note hasn't actually been deleted, but stranger things have happened!

@[email protected] I'm curious to see whether your team evaluated forums as a viable means to communicate and comment re: news stories.

The forums of yesteryear are done and dusted, a future of federated forum softwares await...

Technical stuff ahead 🚨...

This is merely exposing the frontend UI to the already established backend logic.

We have two methods internally that are used for this:

Notes.assert, which when given a object url or id, parses it and attempts to resolve the parent chain all the way to the top-level post. It then creates a topic to house all of those posts. Actors.assert, which when given an object url, id, or handle, creates a local representation of the user. How come "query"/etc. didn't show up?

For both user and post searching, if the passed-in url does not resolve or does not resolve to a processable object, then we do not proceed. It's important to realize that while in an ideal world, we'd all be passing immutable identifiers everywhere, the real world is just a bit messier.

Search queries could be a post or user URL, or a webfinger handle, so additional logic was required to handle those use cases. Most ActivityPub-enabled software I've encountered handle these vanity URLs when queried via ActivityPub — it returns the appropriate representation for processing. Some do not, and so in those cases, those items will not show up in the search results.

@julian I actually just heard about NodeBB for the first time today. And now I see you're a co-founder. Eerie!

As of today, the NodeBB-ActivityPub implementation now supplies both context and audience properties with every post.

N.B. When I say context and audience, these are also terms used by the ForumWG that refer to "topic" and "category", in NodeBB parlance.

Early indications from the last ForumWG meeting indicate movement towards the inclusion of context in a low-level as:Note object (a federated NodeBB post), resolvable as an as:Collection or as:OrderedCollection. The latter is what NodeBB will send, ordered by post time.

Discussions with @[email protected] also suggest that Discourse has the ability to parse an as:OrderedCollection context if provided, but currently does not if encountered as a property in a Note.

A minor change today also updates the audience property, which used to erroneously point to the context/topic, but now points to the audience/category. This change aligns usage of this property with FEP-1b12's expectations.

This change should allow other implementors to:

automatically group objects together given a the provided context, and more thoroughly backfill a given object's context, without relying on inReplyTo traversal

Thats how FEP-1b12 works, its necessary if you want to federate activities such as voting, deletions or mod actions and not only post creations. But Lemmy doesnt support arbitrarily wrapped activities, only specific hardcoded ones like Announce/Create/Note, Announce/Like or Announce/Delete.

trwnh: Topics can be split In addition to splitting topics, topics or their posts can also be merged into another topic. The UX for this is quite variable; sometimes entire topics can be merged into another, sometimes a certain range of posts within a topic (post 5 .. 10 from 15 posts), and sometimes a selection (post 5 and 10 from 15 posts or just a singular item post 5 from 15 posts). trwnh: Topics exist in a category For #Flarum topics can also not exist in a Category (we call them tags and that extension is optional, like all of our extensions). Even when using a Category, once the Category is deleted, we do not hard delete any topics contained within but unlink them, making them less visible but still existing within the Forum. Regardless, to us, Topics CAN exist in a category, it's not required. trwnh: Users can be followed for posts and topics Users can be messaged directly This sounds as if this is a given, I don't think it's guaranteed in every Forum software. But if can implies optional, then

Hey @[email protected], how can I add events to the SWICG calendar? I notice there's a little button to include "Task Forces" in the listing, so I think listing our meetings would be helpful, now that we've settled on a more consistent time/day-of-week.

cc @[email protected] (unrelatedly, do you get notified if I mention your SocialHub handle?)

@julian Ooo good point about adding the ? back on.

If you're interested in a non-regex solution, here's what I have - https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/utils.py#L247

@julian hmm... there must have been something else I did the last time this happened.

@[email protected] said in Article vs. Note vs. Page:

Since then WordPress has joined the Fediverse, and now Ghost is about to join as well. I think the ability to display rich content may soon become a serious competitive advantage.

Completely agreed. The best time to consider a different approach is now, so I am hoping we can make some headway here at the WG meeting. Stay tuned...

cc @[email protected] @[email protected]

@julian @pfefferle note to self, offer more friendly shared hosting

@julian

For example, let's say I link out to Evan's profile here. If NodeBB knew that this link had an alternative AP endpoint, then we could redirect the user instead to the local representation of his profile

Wouldn't Evan's AP endpoint be the same as his HTML endpoint?

Most platforms are going to send you to the authoritative profile, which is the one at the user's server.

And if you wanted to redirect a link to a local profile instead of his official profile, you don't need an endpoint to do that. You could simply parse the post and swap out the URL, since you should have data about the user in your database anyway from when you first detected the user.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the use case here, but I am not sure why a platform would send you to a different platform to view the profile or channel.

@julian @rimu i think that was rimu actually, although i can probably give a summary