@crazycells That's a good question, and not one I'm sure I have the answer for.

It's something I wonder about because it has been said that search engines will penalize sites that contain repetitive content. Does that mean we may see downweighting because federated content can be found word-for-word elsewhere? I don't know.

I think what might be a good practice would be for a site to refer back to the original site if available.

For example, if you inspect the source for this topic, you'll see that it contains a canonical reference:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17867/pre-alpha-activitypub-related-bug-reports?page=3" />

If this topic appears elsewhere (and it does, on the ActivityPub SocialHub), then it would be better if that site also provided a canonical reference back to community.nodebb.org, but that's not a requirement anywhere at this point in time.

That way, a search engine upon encountering a site, would be able to learn the appropriate original source and weight it accordingly.

@julian thanks for the answer. my guess is that since google or bing do not have any contribution to the fediverse or any activitypub adopting sites (or do they?), maybe they will simply not care enough or change anything about their calculations... lol...

additionally, I believe there is this bug ... edited federated posts are not updated on other sites? This is what it looks like on mastodon social however I have edited the second to the last word as ranks 4 days ago?

@julian additionally, I have just checked "ActivityPub SocialHub" , my edited post is not updated there either...

and here -originally- I just made a comment in a topic, but there it looks like I opened a new topic... and with a very ugly title is this because you have adjusted it that way?

@crazycells said:

originally- I just made a comment in a topic, but there it looks like I opened a new topic

That one's because SocialHub (more specifically, Discourse's implementation of ActivityPub) does not automatically traverse up the reply-chain to discover the original post. The original topic pre-dates @angus@socialhub.activitypub.rocks and I syncing the categories together, so SocialHub does not know about the other posts in this topic. In that scenario, it will create a new topic like you saw.

@crazycells said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

edited federated posts are not updated on other sites?

We're sending the appropriate activity out (an Update activity) whenever a post edit takes place.

I believe @oplik0 worked on this a bit, so if there are issues perhaps he may be able to speak to that.

However there is no guarantee that updates are properly handled across the fediverse. Best effort, I guess

Hi @devnull . I haven't been following the forum topic federation discussions very closely, so this may be a silly question. Are forum topics going to be fully federated or just replicated (which is not quite the same thing, even for 2-way sync)? For example, if in the future there are 1000's of NodeBB instances running and there's a topic X, is it possible that the posts for that topic could be coming from multiple NodeBB instances (or other instance implementations)? If so, a topic-level canonical link will not work. Google currently indexes individual Mastodon posts (at least some of them, not sure about all of them). The AP Note identifier is the canonical URL in this case. (Google also indexes actor profiles in some cases, but that's a different discussion. ) FWIW, this is the canonical link I see for this topic: I'm guessing the canonical link you quoted is on the NodeBB side? Since these are different canonical links, I'd expect that Google will consider these (SocialHub and NodeBB topics) to be different web resources with mostly replicated content.

@julian said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

@crazycells said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

edited federated posts are not updated on other sites?

We're sending the appropriate activity out (an Update activity) whenever a post edit takes place.

I believe @oplik0 worked on this a bit, so if there are issues perhaps he may be able to speak to that.

However there is no guarantee that updates are properly handled across the fediverse. Best effort, I guess

thank you for your efforts. are likes and dislikes on a post also federated out?

@stevebate@socialhub.activitypub.rocks hmm... I cannot see the canonical link you posted here...

thanks for the explanation, if I understand it correctly, this means that search engines will probably penalize the websites for federation with the current settings, right?

@crazycells it may, it may not, nobody knows exactly how search engines rank sites

from from - repeated word

@stevebate@socialhub.activitypub.rocks said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

Are forum topics going to be fully federated or just replicated (which is not quite the same thing, even for 2-way sync)?

Fully federated, if I am able to. That statement means that if two categories are synchronized, be they NodeBB, Discourse, or Flarum, responses to one would end up propagating over to the other and vice versa. Things like likes would propagate through.

I haven't quite thought through the potential implications of changing rel="canonical", so there are probably gaps in my logic. Maybe rel="alternate" is a better fit.

@julian Even with the latest commits from activitypub branch, I am getting This NodeBB is currently aware of 0 server(s) . Please allow admins to block/allow specific servers

@bh4-tech That's because that counter is not a real counter

I have not yet worked on allow-list or deny-list filtering of servers.

Test reply from Lemmy

@nutomic@voyager.lemmy.ml hello! Hope it was a successful test

More of a todo than bug: but https://community.nodebb.org/world does not allow to mark as read. (So going there shows the same posts that were there even if you have accessed them)

@the-skyfoxx that's intentional, it acts more like a category than a list of unread topics.

So you can mark a topic as read but it'll stay there, just like marking a topic read in an existing category.

@julian Mastodon and other platforms don't understand the concept of threaded conversations, which is why they haven't implemented something like that.

I am not sure how to implement this in ActivityPub, but in the Zot protocol, Hubzilla actually fetches the entire thread from the authoritative source.

So we don't depend on the entire thread being sent to us. We ask for a copy of all of the posts in the thread from the server with the top level post, which arguably is the authoritative version of the thread.

Other servers pushing messages to us is a great way to get notified of new posts, but pulling messages would yield the full conversation.

I am not sure if there is a way to pull in ActivityPub.

@julian Another thing that Hubzilla does, mostly to remain compatible with platforms that don't understand forums, is have the forum redistribute all of the posts in the thread.

So, when you comment on a post, your app only sends it to the Hubzilla forum, and then the forum looks and sees who is following that thread or who is a member of the forum, and redistributes a copy of the post to everyone who is supposed to get it.

So as long as you are following that thread or are a member of that forum, you get a copy of all of the new messages. (And if you are using Zot protocol, it fetches all of the recent posts when you first follow the forum, which gives you complete threads for recent conversations.)

And one reason why I may be missing some of the posts in this thread is that I am following you (and some others) and not the forum itself.

How do I follow this forum or thread specifically?

@scott@authorship.studio said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

I am not sure if there is a way to pull in ActivityPub.

No standard ways, at present, but of course, you can always do an S2S call for the individual objects themselves. The problem is, how do you get the whole thread (which as you mention above, Mastodon can't even support at present). Hell, how do you even get the authoritative source besides traversing up the entire reply chain?

I often feel like I am pushing against the "ActivityPub zeitgeist" of sorts, because I am plainly advocating for a thoughtfully designed pull-based mechanism for backfill purposes, but at least among those I've talked to, I'm not hearing any pushback.

I am not sure how to implement this in ActivityPub, but in the Zot protocol, Hubzilla actually fetches the entire thread from the authoritative source.

In NodeBB, each object references a context, which is an OrderedCollection of other objects. That context is the authoritative source (or at least, as authoritative as NodeBB can determine).

I'm planning a survey on context usage, to see whether other implementors use it at all, and how.