Taking notes on the observed general communication preferences within the #ActivityPub developer community...
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@julian
> the @forum-wg has been tasked (under the SocialCG charter) with improving UX between threadiverse applicationsFantastic! I'd love to participate in this if I'm welcome to. As you've probably noticed, I have a real passion for this and lots of ideas for improving UX.
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@albert_inkman
> If discussion threads were native to the fediverse, communities would own their discourse and could migrate without losing contextYes and no. I was just reading about all the communities that were lost when the flagship KBin service shut down unexpectedly. It would be great if there was a way to make the address system for communities independent of DNS and originating servers, as Matrix rooms are. So communities can survive the originating server going down for good.
@strypey You're right—KBin showed federated doesn't help if the node dies. Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skip.
Maybe the answer is multi-homing from the start—communities existing across several coordinating nodes. More resilient than today's monolithic or loosely federated setups.
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@strypey You're right—KBin showed federated doesn't help if the node dies. Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skip.
Maybe the answer is multi-homing from the start—communities existing across several coordinating nodes. More resilient than today's monolithic or loosely federated setups.
(1/?)
@albert_inkman
> Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skipRedundancy as it multiple copies of room data stored across multiple homeservers? Fediverse servers do that too, just not in a way where the community layer can be reconstituted if the server that owns its address goes down.
Or do you mean redundancy as in publishing and getting admin approval for room aliases on different homeservers? A lot of folks using Matrix skip that.
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(1/?)
@albert_inkman
> Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skipRedundancy as it multiple copies of room data stored across multiple homeservers? Fediverse servers do that too, just not in a way where the community layer can be reconstituted if the server that owns its address goes down.
Or do you mean redundancy as in publishing and getting admin approval for room aliases on different homeservers? A lot of folks using Matrix skip that.
(2/2)
@albert_inkman
> Maybe the answer is multi-homing from the start—communities existing across several coordinating nodesAgain, this is the case natively with Matrix rooms. At least once at least one person joins whose account isn't hosted on the originating homeserver.
Accounts can exist nomadically across servers in Zot/Nomad apps like Hubzilla and Forte (which also support AP). So I presume groups can too. But as with Matrix, this has to be initiated by setting up clones of them.
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@strypey You're right—KBin showed federated doesn't help if the node dies. Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skip.
Maybe the answer is multi-homing from the start—communities existing across several coordinating nodes. More resilient than today's monolithic or loosely federated setups.
I think threadiverse applications can tolerate the shutdown of instances quite well given that the backbone of inter-process communication (fep 1b12) means disparate communities are synchronized once the community has gained at least one follower.
However, there's room for improvement. It doesn't mean that the now-downed instance is preserved and archived in one central place (after all, decentralization, yes?). Its copies could be scattered all over the threadiverse on different instances, and so gathering them all up could be a herculean task all on its own <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://activitypub.space/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f613.png?v=17fdcb28ed2" title="
" />Then there are some instances who have strict content preservation settings. NodeBB, for example, keeps threadiverse stuff for 14 days and then prunes it away, 7 for the wider fediverse. Obviously this is just a starting point and would need adjusting, but it is something to consider.
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@julian
> the @forum-wg has been tasked (under the SocialCG charter) with improving UX between threadiverse applicationsFantastic! I'd love to participate in this if I'm welcome to. As you've probably noticed, I have a real passion for this and lots of ideas for improving UX.
... and we'd love to have you @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz!
We used to meet monthly, Thursdays, at 1300h Eastern Standard Time, but it's not exactly a wonderful time in New Zealand (7am?). It turns out the main developer of Piefed is from NZ, so it seemed a little exclusive, eh?
I'll be hosting discussions exclusively on @forum-wg from now on.
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(1/?)
@albert_inkman
> Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skipRedundancy as it multiple copies of room data stored across multiple homeservers? Fediverse servers do that too, just not in a way where the community layer can be reconstituted if the server that owns its address goes down.
Or do you mean redundancy as in publishing and getting admin approval for room aliases on different homeservers? A lot of folks using Matrix skip that.
@strypey I meant the latter—publishing room aliases across multiple homeservers so community identity isn't dependent on any single authority node dying. Even with data replication, if the 'canonical' server goes down, the community's address goes with it. But you're right that most projects treating it as a nice-to-have rather than a foundational requirement. That feels like a design oversight when communities are supposed to be decentralized.
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@julian
> It turns out the main developer of Piefed is from NZAe, @rimu and I met years ago, and see each other from time to time at conferences and such. Although not for a while. Aotearoa is a*very* small country ; )
> I'll be hosting discussions exclusively on @forum-wg from now on
Cool, I'll hook into that with my new PieFed account. I'm new to PieFeb so that will take a bit of faffing about. Feel free to prod me if you don't see start participating within about a week.
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@julian
> It turns out the main developer of Piefed is from NZAe, @rimu and I met years ago, and see each other from time to time at conferences and such. Although not for a while. Aotearoa is a*very* small country ; )
> I'll be hosting discussions exclusively on @forum-wg from now on
Cool, I'll hook into that with my new PieFed account. I'm new to PieFeb so that will take a bit of faffing about. Feel free to prod me if you don't see start participating within about a week.
@julian @rimu
FYI When I click that @forum-wg Actor in @Mastodon web, it opens the ActivityPub.space forum in a new tab, rather than navigating the app to the profile for that Actor. That's not the behaviour I expected, and I'm not sure it's the ideal UX.Is that a nodeBB problem or a Mastodon problem or both?
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@julian @rimu
FYI When I click that @forum-wg Actor in @Mastodon web, it opens the ActivityPub.space forum in a new tab, rather than navigating the app to the profile for that Actor. That's not the behaviour I expected, and I'm not sure it's the ideal UX.Is that a nodeBB problem or a Mastodon problem or both?
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz I think that was a NodeBB problem, the category wasn't set up to federate (oops!)
Can you try again?
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@julian
> Can you try again?Still doing the same thing in Mastodon web (on mobile this time). Same in @moshidon which is usually pretty good at recognising and opening AP Activities and Actors.
Patchli isn't recognising it as an Actor.
In FediLab it opens a test profile;
Are you sure the nodeBB WebFinger implementation works properly? Some more recent AP implementations haven't worked the kinks out of this yet. Which is fair enough, as it's a de facto standard, not in the AP spec.
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@julian
> Can you try again?Still doing the same thing in Mastodon web (on mobile this time). Same in @moshidon which is usually pretty good at recognising and opening AP Activities and Actors.
Patchli isn't recognising it as an Actor.
In FediLab it opens a test profile;
Are you sure the nodeBB WebFinger implementation works properly? Some more recent AP implementations haven't worked the kinks out of this yet. Which is fair enough, as it's a de facto standard, not in the AP spec.
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz I'm able to resolve it on fosstodon: https://fosstodon.org/@forum-wg@activitypub.space
If the link itself in the post still refuses to work then perhaps that's a different issue...
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@julian
> I'm able to resolve it on fosstodonWhen I search for the @ forum-wg@activitypub.space Actor, Mastodon web can find it, and follow it. I presume the other apps can too.
> If the link itself in the post still refuses to work
It does, at least when the expected behaviour of clicking on it is navigating to the Actor profile. Also I noticed as I was typing the @name above (before I put a space after the @ to make it render as text), the UI gave me that same test profile as a suggestion.
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