NodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance

@julian Well, there are object types that Mastodon couldn't even handle if it wanted to. For example, it doesn't have anything to handle an Event-type object with. I don't think Gargron would build an event calendar into Mastodon just for Event-type objects, not unless enough people pester him to do just that.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon

@Darius Kazemi The local caching of all media is one of Mastodon's "Achilles' heels", unfortunately. But I guess that's required if media files can only be handled as files attached to a post.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon

I need to chime in here because I guess it's unclear why Mastodon handles Article-type objects the way it handles them. @Darius Kazemi, in case you read this, this should be interesting for you as well. For it all dates back to a "kerfuffle" between Mastodon and Hubzilla in 2017 when only these two supported ActivityPub.

All this is not due to the length of Article-type objects. It is due to their tendency of having extensive HTML formatting and Mastodon's total refusal to support the latter, save for a tiny subset that was introduced with Mastodon 4.0 about two years ago.

For example, Mastodon does not support any embedded images. At all. Its HTML sanitiser removes them entirely. If you see images as file attachments under posts from Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams), it's because Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) themselves add images as file attachments to posts going out via ActivityPub in addition to embedding them. Without this step on their side, Mastodon wouldn't show these images at all.

The first two Fediverse projects to adopt ActivityPub were Hubzilla in July, 2017, and Mastodon in September, 2017. Well into 2018, these two were the only projects to support ActivityPub. But they were as different as night and day, and they still are.

Hubzilla posts fulfill all criteria of Article-type objects: their length, their formatting, the presence of a title (not to be confused with the summary a.k.a. Mastodon's CW) etc., and so Hubzilla started sending its posts as Article-type objects. Mastodon, however, kept stripping out any and all formatting from Hubzilla posts, leaving only the bare plain text. It also ignored the title and treated the summary as a content warning.

Mike Macgirvin, creator of Friendica and Hubzilla and still maintainer of Hubzilla, complained about this to Eugen Rochko, I think he even filed a bug report on Mastodon's GitHub repository. Rochko staunchly refused to cooperate and include anything into Mastodon that isn't old-school, purist, Twitter-style microblogging. Not even read-only. This went back and forth for a while.

And then, I guess in order not to look like Mastodon is completely and utterly butchering long-form content on purpose, Rochko introduced Mastodon's current way of handling Article-type objects. Namely essentially not at all. Or rather, by linking to the original.

Macgirvin saw this as an attempt at spiting Hubzilla and effectively excluding any and all Hubzilla content from Mastodon and switched Hubzilla to sending its extensively formatted posts as Note-type objects henceforth. Mastodon still butchers them, but at least, Mastodon users don't have to open each and every post and comment from Hubzilla separately to read them.

Fast-forward to 2023. Mario Vavti has been the Hubzilla maintainer since 2018. It was in 2023 that he released Hubzilla 9.0. It returned to Article-type objects by default, even for existing channels, with a per-channel (not per-post) switch to return to Note-type objects.

After the upgrade, complaints came in that Mastodon messes with Hubzilla posts now. At this point, Hubzilla had all-but forgotten how Mastodon treats Article-type objects. Hubzilla 9 with its Article-type objects brought it back to memory and proved that Mastodon had changed nothing about its treatment of Article-type objects.

Vavti promptly rolled out a hotfix that hard-coded Hubzilla back to Note-type objects only and defeated the per-channel switch. He vowed to not have Hubzilla send Article-type objects for as long as Mastodon refuses to display Article-type objects with full HTML rendering. The switch was removed in Hubzilla 9.1.

So the appropriate way for Mastodon to support Article-type objects can only include no longer "sanitising" all the formatting out of them and finally allowing a much, much larger subset of HTML formatting, explicitly including an unlimited number of embedded inline images.

@Stefan Bohacek @jdp23 @julian "Shadow mentioning" is a thing. (streams) and Forte do it to avoid clutter. Mentions don't have to be visible in a post/comment to work.

Little heads-up: So far, Hubzilla renders everything the way I guess it's intended. Nothing out of the ordinary.

@julian @Erin I'm not a dev, so I don't have the technical details down pat.

But Friendica and everything that came after it, including Hubzilla, handle conversations as something enclosed with exactly one (1) post and otherwise only comments, as opposed to Mastodon's loose chain of posts. Replies are always comments instead of posts, and they're always sent to the thread starter who is the owner of the whole thread, and who then distributes them to all participants.

Right after Friendica, permissions were introduced. These aren't stored with each comment separately and with the post only for the post itself. Rather, they're unified for the whole thread. The thread starter defines who is allowed to see what and who is allowed to do what. As opposed to Mastodon, commenters cannot change the permissions of their comments away from those of the start post.

Last year, (streams) switched to conversations as containers. To the outward, it works the same, but internally, it's different. Again, I'm not a dev. @Mike Macgirvin ️ has made all this. But to my understanding, this is when a thread really became an object of its own.

CC: @infinite love ⴳ @Evan Prodromou @silverpill

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Conversations

@julian @Emelia It's also fair to mention that this has been the standard mode of operation for everything @Mike Macgirvin ️ has ever created until this year, starting in 2010 with Mistpark which is Friendica today. Friendica still behaves like this, Hubzilla still behaves like this, and (streams) behaved like this until the move to Collections in 2023. Forte is the only exception, it started with Collections right away which, on the outside, don't feel much different.

After all, they're more or less Facebook alternatives. And not the Twitter clone as which the Fediverse in its entirety is being perceived nowadays.

The advantage of this is that everyone who participates in a conversation generally always receives all replies. Not only those that mention them.

From a Mastodon point of view, this concept may appear either revolutionary or entirely unimaginable. But it has been around for 14 years.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations

@julian What Lemmy understands is this:

Title

@Community

Post body

It was added back in the day to make it possible for Mastodon users to start new threads in connected Lemmy communities.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta