NodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance

@nutomic@lemmy.ml Mostly what I've observed is significant instances of timing out when trying to find communities on new instances from non-Lemmy-based websites, something that hasn't been notable from Lemmy-to-Lemmy first encounters.

@eeeee Yeah, Lemmy rougher are the edges than it looks sometimes. Part of the issue, I think, is that older versions of the software don't parallelize federation, so the queues can get way backed up. I've also just had follow requests from nodeBB dropped at an unusually high rate, which makes me think that Lemmy is doing things internally to compensate for some of the sharp edges of federation.

This is incredible, Julian. I'm legitimately kind of stunned by this, how well it's working already, and how quickly this got refactored.

@AltCode One significant potential issues with listing all followed categories in the same kind of layout as /categories is the below-the-fold effect, or the page-2 effect as one might have called it in earlier times. Whatever categories end up falling below a certain scroll distance will just never been seen by most users. If you follow a lot of categories, the ones that end up closer to the bottom of the list than the top will just end up ignored. It doesn't encourage participation, and it also doesn't discourage following a lot of categories that you don't actually care about.

And follow relationships are very important under ActivityPub, since they dictate content flow. Bringing in a lot of remote content that no one on the local forum is actually reading or engaging with is very wasteful.

An easily accessible compact list might be better, with different sorting options so that users can choose to have categories with new content float to the top. Usually with forum categories, you want the ordering to be static, but that expectation won't necessarily be there for just a list.

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories:
Well, this sounds absolutely amazing.

> Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

Oh, that would be my personal preference, and I imagine it would be what many others looking for a federated forum would prefer, too. Forums are semi-curated spaces, after all. The only reason allowing users to customize their view of /categories is I think it might be what users who grew up with big social would expect. Like, a lot of ex-redditors using Lemmy-based websites seem to actively resent the idea that the local website should be meaningful in any way, or that they should engage with anything other than their f.

But it's probably not what's best for the forum. Nor for the fediverse.

@eeeee @julian There are topic-specific Lemmy-based websites. startrek.website, ttrpg.network, etc. exist, and function much more like a traditional forum than a catch-all "general purpose" social networking or social media aggregation site, like Facebook or Reddit.

And I personally have argued, and continue to argue, that the Reddit model doesn't really work on the Fediverse. That the desire to create a simulacrum of large scale, centralized social media doesn't really scale well once you have multiple websites, and that focusing on a local-first framework is the more logical and more sustainable model long term.

I don't think modeling Lemmy communities as being the equivalent of an entire nodeBB website will stand the test of time. The idea that the hosting website matters continues to seep into the thinking of many Lemmy users, and so it should matter to non-Lemmy websites, too.

People on Lemmy sometimes ask if there's a way to view communities by hosting site. This is a view that the Reddit-like UI has no natural way of supporting, but forums do. I would love to be able to see remote groups listed as categories in sub-forums ('sections' seems to be the nodeBB jargon?)

I've brought up elsewhere, too, about being able to create my own categories-style layout in /world; assigning remote groups to my own pseudo-sections would be amazing. Having the option to have these personalized pseudo-sections show up in the main categories view would be even better.

I've also mentioned in the past having a way for regular forum users to 'boost' posts from /world into official forum categories. There are a couple of ways to imagine this, with the most straightforward being just moving/copying the topic into the category, just as admins can currently do. But there's also the cross-post feature from Reddit/Lemmy, where there's a back-link to the original post, and the content displayed in a block quote. I see value in both of those options, though I can't imagine any given forum would want to support both.

User pseudo-categories could even be shareable. There's no reason they need to be strictly private (though, of course, users should be able to choose to make them so, if they were shareable). They'd functionally be like lists on Twitter, or custom feeds on Reddit, but with a section/category UI. Or not, I guess -- they could be treated as feeds, too, but I'm kinda sorta very, very over "feeds", personally.

I've been noticing a lot more hanging follow requests with/from Lemmy since upgrading to 4.1. It's not consistent, though -- some Lemmy sites continue to process them fine, and some don't. I initially thought it had to do with the Lemmy version, but I'm seeing both behaviours from 0.19.9, so... *shrug*.

@trwnh@mastodon.social Yes, I'm familiar with the gripes of the fediverse old guard, and all I can say to them is "maybe you shouldn't use an open protocol if you don't want it to be open".

Or maybe they should embrace the inevitable network split, which seemingly everyone in the space cannot stop wringing their hands over.

You don't get to make a private club in the middle of the public park, and crying that all of these people keep showing up every morning to walk their dog is absurd.

@trwnh@mastodon.social I don't think the discussion is about user adoption, though. I don't think that there's any question that the fediverse still isn't ready for "normie" use. The fediverse still doesn't know what it is. It's an emergent space, and we have no idea what this looks like in practice when there's enough people or alternative platforms to stop playing a combination of "rugged individualist on my one-man self-hosted ultra-linux fruit-pie that I built into my own self-pleasure device" and "uncanny make-believe centralized social media".

I think the core complaint that Julian is responding to is one of developers trying to make products that someone might actually want to use, and that aren't weird and masturbatory personal art projects.

The fediverse is full of arthouse auteur programmers.

This has been an attitude more generally on Mastodon over the 3 years that I've been there. There's this deep undercurrent of "finally, we're getting the attention we deserve" but also "shut up and let us talk". It seems that people who are used to being the only people in the room are craving an audience, not people actually using their toys.

There's a group of people -- developers or otherwise -- that saw the fediverse as their private little sandbox, and openly resent anyone else coming into the space, or at the very least, anyone else coming into their space and not following their rules.

It's been a significant blocker to adoption for the platform, and for the fediverse as a whole.

One of the issues that I have with almost every other major Fediverse engine is that it can be summed up as "Big centralized commercial social media, but with a worse UX". They all ape the design language of centralized services, and then make them more complicated by federating. The biggest ones really seem to go out of their way to hide the fact that you're talking to people on other websites.

I have major issues with Mastodon's quite attempts to make every Mastodon website look exactly the same. But they're basically all guilty of trying to look like something they're not, in a way that fundamentally limits what the fediverse can be. Or really, what it really is.

Bulletin boards get to come at this problem from the totally opposite side. They are things that have always distributed, and their users don't have this expectation of having everything in one place all of the time. Neither NodeBB nor Discourse are trying to create a seamless, drop-in experience for Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram users, and because of that it opens up a huge design space. And also a hugely undefined design space.

I agree that /world is wanting. As a microblog space, it suffers from the forum post norms of title+body (something which has never made it into microblogging), with the result that many short-but-not-quite-short-enough posts require you to click through, only to get 3 or 4 more words than what were displayed in the auto-generated titile. As a remote forum space, it suffers from the disorganization mentioned here. But still, as a first step into this new mesh social network, there's something really, really cool about it.

But man, do I ever desperately want the bulletin board experience in /world. It really feels like what the fediverse was always meant to be, to me.

@julian I have the same hesitations around having categories follow user accounts. Most users are not categories, and they do not post categorically.

But some are. Satire accounts. Bot accounts. Institutional accounts, as you've called out. These are fairly safe bets, and it would be nice to allow admins the choice to roll the dice.

But another paradigm to explore is lists, and there are a number of ways to represent those. /world could be reconfigured into /feed (stepping on the toes of the Feeds plugin), with users being able to create arbitrary feeds for themselves.

Or lists could be represented as user-created pseudo-categories, given the UX of a forum category, but being personal to the user. They could be presented in /world exclusively, or appended to the bottom of the user's categories list.

Forum-wide lists could be considered, creating global pseudo-categories defined by admins or moderators, with a slightly modified layout and/or visual language.

This is really the transformation of a long standing medium. There's a huge possibility and design space here.

@julian "We're making a super cool product that's adopting this space" tends to go over well in the Fediverse, yeah. We love being catered to with cool toys and tools!

And good God do I miss real forums, after a decade on Reddit.

@eeeee
From this website, you can follow almost any user account you want on almost any Mastodon-, Lemmy-, mbin-, PixelFed-, Misskey- (and its forks), Hometown-, Friendica-, Hubzilla-, or Mitra-based website, barring a few minor obstacles (neither side needs to have blocked the other, neither side needs to have disabled federation, and the user you're following needs to have not blocked you). You can also follow groups like Lemmy communities, or Guppe groups.

There's really no need to have accounts on all platforms. Not unless you want to have separation between what you post, or want the variation in UX that comes with all of these different pieces of software focusing on different core experiences.

What's important to know is that they work via syndication -- content is mirrored across the network, not viewed insitu -- and that syndication doesn't occur without prompting. So, you need to go through the steps of entering a remote user or group's url or full account address (username@host.tld) in order to fetch content, and that content, by and large, is not backfilled.

If you can accept these limitations, then a single Mastodon, mbin, nodeBB, etc. account is all you need.

I can no longer reproduce the issue!

@julian That's the URL I've tried to use. It just won't fetch it for some reason. But if I search any of the comments, it'll pull it in just fine. https://community.nodebb.org/post/103252, for instance, pulls the whole thread in.

Restarting nodeBB renders your missing comment, though!

I was looking at this post from my own forum (nBB 4.0.3) via various vectors, and trying to pull it in from here resulted in a couple of hiccups.

1. Searching the posts community.nodebb.org URL did not pull the post and its comments. Naturally, searching the original URL works fine (though does not fetch the comments, naturally)
2. Fetching my comment from that post does fetch the post and full comment chain, but your comment, @julian, is surprisingly empty (link)

Just thought you'd like to know.

Most other people won't realize it either, I don't think. I've just been clicking on everything with abandon and stumbled across it.

There's a lot that can be done to make off-site content a bigger part of the forum user experience going forward, but I would agree that this is a big one. The mechanism is already there to do this -- the All Topics button gives you the forum's global feed -- it could just use a little finessing.

@rynach@mstdn.io Lemmy isn't a forum, though. There's much more to being a forum than just having topics. Basic moderation tools (like post splitting, merging) etc. are lacking, and more advanced features that have been longtime standards on forums are totally absent.

The UX is that of Reddit, and Reddit is as much a forum as Twitter is a blog.

And LemmyBB hasn't been updated in iver 2 years. Does it even work with the current back end?