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*.
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.
@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 ([email protected]) 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! :fireworks:
@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.
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.
@julian said in Is ActivityPub too complicated?: > Let me look into nodebb-to-nodebb folllowing, that definitely should be working!
Have you verified that it is? Because I'm getting a never-ending Pending status when trying to sync to @testing-ground. Things federate fine, but without the syncing being established, they either don't get addressed to my instance, or are dumped into /world if I specifically reference someone on my site. And it's a little weird that they're not all ending up in /world, because I have an account that's following @testing-ground.
@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.