agnos.is Forums

julian It might take me a couple of days, but I'll get back to you soon.

@[email protected] 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.

@julian The way cross-posting works on Lemmy and Reddit is basically to copy the post, so there's not necessarily a reason to break the one-to-one mapping of posts-to-categories. (Though, actually, looking at Reddit, I think it's actually a new post with an internal link preview, rather than a wholesale copy of content as it is on Lemmy). But more advanced frameworks could be interesting

@julian said in Live testing of remote categories:
> You can now no longer mention a remote category. Instead, create your topic right in that category itself. As it should be .

Huzzah!

Now, are there any plans to support cross-posting?

@[email protected] Sure, but in terms of usage, most group actors are going to be sharing collections of posts by multiple users that have some connection or commonality, which will far, far, far more commonly seem appropriate to map on to a category than anything else.

@[email protected] said in Live testing of remote categories:
> one thing to watch out for is that not every Group represents something that can be mapped to a category

Sure, but they most of them also don't represent something that can be considered an individual. And it's way easier to treat a 'category' as a group than it is to treat a group as an individual.

@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 NodeBB 4.2.0:
> added an additional setting for a remote-only addendum for local categories

A request I meant to raise several times, that I never seemed to remember to do. Amazing!

@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.

@julian Yeah, it's been a long time coming. The disparate views on single discussions was one of the uncanny things that killed the 2022 wave. That, quote posts, and people not groking the whole "the internet has more than 5 websites" thing, and the Masto devs have or are now taking action against all of those speed bumps.

Good on them for being responsive, I guess if not agile.

@niels Yeah, automatic retrieval isn't something one should currently expect from Mastodon. As julian mentions above, it doesn't currently proactively do anything to ensure completeness. It relies on the individual subscription relationships for that, and it doesn't work very well.

It currently makes the most sense to view ActivityPub as a technology that pulls in top-level posts into new social sites, for the users on that site to discuss amongst themselves (and the original poster), but this isn't what most users want it to be. People want, and seemingly expect, full discussion context. And so we see the discussions julian's involved in with other platform developers to land on some kind of standard way to extend ActivityPub for this stuff.

@niels said in Moving fediverse thread into forum: Handling replies:
> Any future replies are not federated, unless they @ a forum user og any forum user follows the person replying (and even then maybe not, Fedi is Mysterious)

@julian This one's kind of interesting, as different fedi services seem to work differently, and group-based ones usually do some work to keep comments flowing. But nodeBB doesn't seem to always play nice with that at the moment.

I found a Lemmy post via url search and then moved it into a category. I then followed the group actor for the community. Posts and comments seem to flow fine in /world:

But the post that was moved receives no updates to speak of:

Interestingly, it does keep showing up in /unread as new comments are posted to the post on Lemmy, even though those comments never land in the topic on my forum, suggesting that nodeBB knows about them, but may not know where to put them:

@eeeee Are time stamps sent with the post? Or created at arrival? If the latter, it's probably just that posts were sent to or processed by the Lemmy host in a different order than they were originally posted.

There's an inherent relativity of simlutaniaty issue with federation.

@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*.

@[email protected] 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.

@[email protected] 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.