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Honestly I think that if interoperability between different types of federated platforms Just Worked people would "understand" it more intuitively, because they'd see it in action instead of it having to be explained to them as an abstract concept.
I'm a fairly tech-savvy user, and I perfectly understand what federation is and how it works on a technical level, but even I find the UI aspects often confusing or downright impossible to figure out.
For example, I saw this thread from my Mastodon client because I followed the ActivityPub topic on this forum from my Mastodon account. In my Mastodon client the posts appear as boosts, but mostly with broken HTML formatting. I clicked through to this forum to read the thread properly. I then wanted to "like" / +1 a post, so I copied the permalink into my Mastodon client like I would for a post on a different Mastodon instance, but it couldn't find anything. In the end I had to log into my local account on this forum instead.Don't get me wrong, the UI problems are very difficult to get right. But I think they're more important than documentation. When it Just Works, people will grok it and documentation/explanation won't be needed.
caesar Yep that's it in a nutshell, nailed it, when it hits the "it just works" moment, this affords intuitive mass adoption
Getting to that point is filled with blood sweat and tears.
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
Good points, and want to add, as credit to julian , what he's building is complex.
Not many developers could do it.
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julian Here's the one I saw today: https://indieweb.social/@[email protected]/113101718634936122
However, I now see that the broken HTML appears in the original post on this forum, so it's not a federation problem. Apologies for the 'false alarm' on that aspect. I've definitely seen broken formatting before, but haven't clicked through to check where the issue was. I'll keep an eye out for it again.
That said, my point was mainly about the difficulty of actually working out how to interact with posts from a different instance (especially one running different software), rather than about the actual content of the federated messages.
caesar okay, how about the permalink issue? Can you show me the link you tried to paste into Mastodon? That definitely should work. That's a fairly standard flow (which is already janky, and can be improved)
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caesar okay, how about the permalink issue? Can you show me the link you tried to paste into Mastodon? That definitely should work. That's a fairly standard flow (which is already janky, and can be improved)
julian it was this one: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/7
It's a Discourse post (and thus problem) rather than a NodeBB one, but it illustrates the point of the general jankiness of inter-platform interaction on the fediverse: if I copy the permalink of your post above into my Mastodon instance, it finds it and I can reply, but if I copy the permalink of a Discourse post from the same thread, it doesn't work. -
Good points, and want to add, as credit to julian , what he's building is complex.
Not many developers could do it.eeeee Absolutely, and julian has my deepest respect for that. Like I mentioned, the UI for inter-platform interactions is definitely a really tricky problem to solve in an intuitive way, and I don't think any Fediverse platform has managed it yet. (I'm very interested in this because I'm starting to consider similar issues as they relate to the Fediverse implementation in Forgejo.)
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
julian sorry to multi-post but I forgot to say: although I can find your post from my Mastodon account and reply to it, I still haven't worked out how I would do the reverse from here. In fact I'm not sure if I can follow a Mastodon account (or perhaps more usefully, a Discourse or Lemmy topic or even a topic or account on a different NodeBB instance) from a NodeBB account at all, is that possible yet?
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
caesar the Discourse link you posted raises another issue.
Its a similar thread to this one, but it has additional posters, and any edits made in my posts arent reflected.
So these conversations arent fully federated when there are some posts in that thread missing from this one.
Out of interest Omega, did you start your post on Discourse or on this site? -
I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
As an example as the disconnect between the thread on Nodebb and Discourse, [email protected] 's post is missing from nodebb sites thread.
And conversley some of Ceasars posts are in this thread but not that one.
Isnt the goal to duplicate all posts in all places so they stay in sync? -
As an example as the disconnect between the thread on Nodebb and Discourse, [email protected] 's post is missing from nodebb sites thread.
And conversley some of Ceasars posts are in this thread but not that one.
Isnt the goal to duplicate all posts in all places so they stay in sync?@eeeee The lack of complete federation is another very good (and very hard to solve) point that makes federation less-than-intuitive. From my Mastodon instance the situation is worse, none of @bumblefudge 's posts nor any others from SocialHub appear in the thread. (See https://indieweb.social/@julian@community.nodebb.org/112972609579702339)
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@eeeee The lack of complete federation is another very good (and very hard to solve) point that makes federation less-than-intuitive. From my Mastodon instance the situation is worse, none of @bumblefudge 's posts nor any others from SocialHub appear in the thread. (See https://indieweb.social/@julian@community.nodebb.org/112972609579702339)
I suspect most of the federation problems mentioned in the last few posts are the "fault" of Discourse – BrowserPub fails to find anything at https://browser.pub/https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/4 – but in the end the user doesn't care whose fault it is when something doesn't work, they just think federation is confusing and broken.
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I suspect most of the federation problems mentioned in the last few posts are the "fault" of Discourse – BrowserPub fails to find anything at https://browser.pub/https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/4 – but in the end the user doesn't care whose fault it is when something doesn't work, they just think federation is confusing and broken.
[email protected] the sync issue from Discourse is a little different... That's achieved via a category syncing mechanism that is unique to Discourse and NodeBB, right now that's broken and I have to wait until [email protected] comes back to address it.
Same with the links in Discourse being unsearchable. They'll have to fix that.
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[email protected] the sync issue from Discourse is a little different... That's achieved via a category syncing mechanism that is unique to Discourse and NodeBB, right now that's broken and I have to wait until [email protected] comes back to address it.
Same with the links in Discourse being unsearchable. They'll have to fix that.
[email protected] you can load remote content from the fediverse via NodeBB, just enter the permalink into the search bar.
For users, enter the handle in the users page search bar.
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[email protected] you can load remote content from the fediverse via NodeBB, just enter the permalink into the search bar.
For users, enter the handle in the users page search bar.
caesar caesar@indieweb.social I've manually pulled in [email protected] and [email protected]'s posts now.
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caesar the Discourse link you posted raises another issue.
Its a similar thread to this one, but it has additional posters, and any edits made in my posts arent reflected.
So these conversations arent fully federated when there are some posts in that thread missing from this one.
Out of interest Omega, did you start your post on Discourse or on this site?eeeee I am native posting only
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
Going where no fediverse topic has gone before... not!
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-string-theory-2699363
>String theory is a mathematical theory that tries to explain certain phenomena which is not currently explainable under the standard model of quantum physics.
30 words or less people!
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
Omega, From your descriptive posts I thought you were a writer, but now a Physicist!
Many talents
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Omega, From your descriptive posts I thought you were a writer, but now a Physicist!
Many talentseeeee I always get a Schrödinger's cat vibe off these fediverse topics am I the only one?
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
Personally I think the word Federated is being used as if it was the word disseminated, which to me is more descriptively apt for common understanding.
“your post is disseminated across multiple platforms at once… across the fediverse… and you are like a sun, each post a ray of light that eventually reaches planets... soon disparate planetary religions spring up worshipping your name spanning light years across many galaxies”
Maybe not the last bit
Federated as it is used rather than it’s definition, seems more like a conflation shorthand of federation and dissemination into a single word placeholder, this might be my very personally arcane issue.
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
Here is an edited version of the wiki entry for the fediverse:
>The fediverse is a collection of social networks that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network.
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I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben ([email protected] and also [email protected])... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to
mere mortalslaymennon-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with [email protected] on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io
How about... the fediverse is like what happens when you build a bunch of interstates between big websites
You could get into railroad and telegraph analogies to, draw your frame. It's the quantum location superposition of your post that's kinda the pickle to explain to the average noodle, or is it?
