NodeBB

Hey @rimu@piefed.social thanks for responding (and sorry for the late reply!)

I am not married to the Announce([Article|Note|Page]) approach, so I am definitely open to Create([Article|Note|Page]) with a back-reference. I think I went the former direction because there is a known fallback mechanism — the Announce is treated as a share/boost/repost as normal. However, sending the Create also is fine I think.

1. However, do we need a backreference? In my limited research, it seems that Piefed, et al. picks the first Group actor and associates the post with that community. If I sent over a Create(Article) with two Group actors addressed, could Piefed associate the post with the first, and initiate a cross-post with the remaining Group actors?
2. Secondly, is how to handle sync. 1b12 relies on communities having reciprocal followers in order for two-way synchronization to be established. On my end since I know it is cross-posted I will now send 1b12 activities to cross-posted communities, but can Piefed, et al. send 1b12 activities back as well, in the absence of followers?

cc @andrew_s@piefed.social @nutomic@lemmy.ml @melroy@kbin.melroy.org @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de

@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is basically, yes. It would be a little too involved to upend the entire system to support multiple cids per topic — a lot of our existing code relies on cid being a single value.

This would be an add-on logic of sorts, where each topic has a canonical category, but can also be cross-posted to other communities/categories.

I haven't looked into the differences between their implementation and how groups are implemented using 1b12, but what I have discovered is that the 1b12 community is much larger than I gave it credit for.

@kirkmoodey@universeodon.com yes, Mastodon compatibility is lacklustre but that's partly because the architecture of Mastodon doesn't lend itself well to categorical organization. That's not a criticism, merely a difference that we have to consider.

Currently, when a user addresses multiple communities, then the existing software (NodeBB included) uses the first one. How the rest of the addressed communities are handled is what's of interest here.

@ludrol@szmer.info yes, you're right about that. The silver lining here is that we're at a point where the major players' implementations are local-only, so we don't have to work around with a pre-existing implementation and ensure compatibility.

The second point is that a "cross-post" could have multiple meanings, including manually creating a new post about a link already present in multiple communities. What I'm hoping to describe is a common way that items can be cross-posted natively between instances, while hopefully preserving their reply-trees.

Following up on this question I asked back in late March, I wanted to continue thinking about how one would handle cross-posting between categories/communities, given that there isn't current consensus on it, and especially given that NodeBB—as of v4.3.0—can now see and browse remote categories.

From that original topic, we can distil the following:

1. Both PieFed and Mbin do not natively handle cross-posts, a new entity is made with the crucial bits (link, text, possibly title) copied over and changed if needed, sometimes a "cross-posted from..." helper text is prepended.
2. There are legitimate concerns that a cross-post might not succeed depending on privilege settings on the receiving end, so a pre-flight check (or explicit rejection) of some kind might be required.
3. Cross-posting can be done by the original author, or another user.

So were an FEP to be written, we'd center it around the following assumptions:

• "A user (which may or may not be the object author) is sharing an object to additional audiences"
• We would use the existing Announce(Object) model
• We would not use Announce(Activity) because it is not the original object creation that is being announced, but the object itself, to a new audience.
• Some form of Reject handling would be required for cases where the cross-post is not allowed
• How the receiver handles the activity is out-of-scope of the FEP. It could be that the original object is contained within multiple categories/communities, or a duplicate object could be created — implementor's choice.

This is very similar to an existing announce/boost/reshare, except that instead of addressing the activity to followers list you are addressing it to a group actor's inbox.

Some additional questions:

1. Is there desire from PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin for supporting incoming (and possibly outgoing) federation of cross-posting?
2. What exactly happens currently if a Group actor receives an Announce(Object)? My guess is nothing, currently, but let me know otherwise <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://community.nodebb.org/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f604.png?v=aafd56e36a3" title="" />
3. Would this allow you to accept cross-posts from other AP applications without needing to refactor any existing code?
4. Duplicating the object would mean the discussion is split between objects. The ideal implementation would be the same object present in multiple categories/communities. Is there desire for this in the threadiverse?

@rimu@piefed.social @andrew_s@piefed.social @melroy@kbin.melroy.org @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de @nutomic@lemmy.ml @angusmcleod@mastodon.social