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How do PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin handle cross-posting? (community.nodebb.org)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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tl;dr — how do PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin handle cross-posting?

Currently, when a NodeBB admin moves a topic from the uncategorized pseudo-category into a local category, we federate out an as:Announce, people typically think of that as a "boost" or "share".

That worked fine when the entirety of the category list was your local categories plus the "uncategorized" pseudo-category. However, now that NodeBB is moving towards supporting remote categories (via group actors), this UX makes less sense. We wouldn't want to "move" a topic out of the category it is supposed to be in, just for visibility to other local users. Additionally, topic moving was limited to administrators, and from the get-go we knew it would eventually cause issues because people other than admins would want to share topics to other local users.

This is where the "cross-post" functionality comes in, which is entirely new to NodeBB. I don't think this is new to other AP-enabled threaded discussion software. The idea would be that if a new topic comes in, whether it's uncategorized or not, any user could "cross-post" that topic to a local category, where it would be visible to other users on that instance. On the ActivityPub side, we would then federate out an as:Announce as we already do.

Is this what PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin already do, if they support cross-posting? What other alternative solutions would there be to this problem?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Based on the replies received, it does sound like at present that if cross-posting is a consideration, it is something done locally, and not something that is explicitly declared when federating outward or retrieved via AP.

There are also multiple definitions of cross-posting:

  1. Multiple, disparate topics sharing the same attachment url (PieFed)
  2. Author targeting multiple audiences
  3. Non-author sharing object to additional audiences

One of those is really not like the other, which does complicate things somewhat. Thankfully, it does seem like that the way PieFed handles it, is local to the instance.

A good first step might be to narrow down the definition of cross-posting—at least from a protocol level—to a combination of the latter two:

> "A user (which may or may not be the object author) sharing an object to additional audiences"

Of course, this also happens to be what I'm looking for: the association of an as:announce activity with an as:target pointing to an as:Group actor.

Would this be of interest to anybody here? The fallback mechanism is to just treat the announce as usual.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

>the association of an as:announce activity with an as:target pointing to an as:Group actor.

I was thinking about adding target on Announce to bring FEP-1b12 and Conversation Containers closer to each other (in CC we have Add with target).

Can't Group simply be in to of Announce?