What if upon cross-posting the default is separation, but a request is sent to the original community to request a comment tree merge?

Then you don’t have to share comment space with the tankies unless you wish it

cc blaze@piefed.zip

That’s one of the issues that need to be worked through. It’s a totally legitimate concern.

In cases where communities with polarising viewpoints discuss the same topic, it would lead to inter-community disputes and exacerbate some instance relationships.

One solution would be to have the original community be responsible for moderation, and moderation actions from cross-posted communities only affect their “view”, so to speak.

I don’t know what the answer is quite yet.

From a discoverability standpoint it would be beneficial to see other communities’ conversations on the same post.

Hmm… that’s nice, but the comments are still separated.

It would be better if the separate reply chains were integrated but I know there are potential issues that need to be thought through.

blaze@piefed.zip said in The problem of cross-community posting: > That’s a complete overhaul compared to what Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin are doing now.

That might be the case, but it really depends on how the backend is structured. Are the posts and communities so strictly structured that a post cannot be a part of multiple communities? (rimu@piefed.social just pinging you about this)

In NodeBB categories and topics are all distinct elements, and the fact that a topic belongs in a category is contrived. A topic could be part of a user (pinned topics anyone?), a group (group only conversations?), or in this case… multiple categories.

Yup. This is how NodeBB does it, and why cross posting will work with less of an overhaul.

Yes. It is being worked on, and you are not far off.

Respondents here have mentioned that Piefed and Lemmy list cross-posts in places, sometimes in the community listing, sometimes in the post itself.

That’s missing the point, which is that the conversations should be combined.

Take it a step further, though. You shouldn’t have to combine posts, they should all be the same post.

So how do we get there? Both Piefed and Lemmy do this internally, and don’t expose this to other instances. NodeBB (aka me) is hoping to explore this question and put in the protocol research to make this a reality. I’ll be working together with members of the Forum and Threaded Discussions Working Group about these things. (forum-wg@community.nodebb.org)

The issue (as usual) is buy-in from Lemmy and Piefed (and don’t forget mbin!) We all have to move in lockstep so that nobody gets left behind.

We’ve only just started discussions on how this might work, but hopefully we’ll be able to make this a reality soon.

This is an important thing to consider, and why NodeBB decided to even pursue federation at all.

It’s arguable that we’ve reached the point at which forums cannot organically grow due to the ubiquity of social media. Depending on who you ask, we’ve reached that point 10+ years ago already.

It’s becoming increasing imperative that forums federate or risk dying due to attrition. Forums used to be the social network for niche topics. Facebook (with Groups) and Twitter (with hashtags) started competing, and Reddit (with subreddits) made another huge dent.

There are some communities that fear integrating with AP will cause their local communities to become flooded with just anybody. Those fears are unjustified, but understandable.

Heckin’ yeah it is. :sunglasses:

Hey! Thanks for the concise reply. There’s a lot of technical stuff I can say about Discourse and such, but because I am the maintainer for NodeBB it is probably in my best interest to keep my mouth shut as we directly compete!

Anyhow, the OrderedCollection stuff is actually all from me. I’ve been working as part of the Threadiverse working group to bring intercompatible formats to all threadiverse software, which besides Discourse and NodeBB, includes Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin.

The OrderedCollection enables software (like NodeBB) to quickly backfill entire topics. This is a huge problem on the microblog-side of the fediverse, and is not really a problem on the theadiverse, since there is already strong support for synchronization. However, smaller instances often do run into issues where they can’t ever “catch up” on old posts because there’s no way to get those posts. (e.g. start following a new community, you can’t read any of the old content)

To that end, Lemmy and Piefed have (or soon will) ship code to allow software to backfill using OrderedCollections. They don’t use them yet, but they will provide them. It helps software like mine because I will then be able to see entire threads from communities I don’t even know about or follow. It’s a huge boost to discovery! :smile:

> while Discourse decided to use an OrderedCollection, with the first item being the opening post.

NodeBB also does this, but they’re not incompatible per se. You’ll see NodeBB topics showing up just fine on Lemmy and Piefed (see activitypub@community.nodebb.org or general), and that’s because NodeBB does the extra step of announcing OP and replies, just like Lemmy/Piefed.

Importantly, Discourse does this too, but because of the inability to find Discourse categories, I don’t think it’s easy to follow them. Chicken and egg, really. The way the AP integration in Discourse is built-out, it is more insular by design. Threads from Discourse only ever go out to the fediverse, you can’t post in from the fediverse. That makes those communities much more insular by design and severely limits discovery.

Now this is a good reason to move a community to a different region.

I’m sorry, this is not how federation works, and if it were truly as limited as “one activity at a time”, moving a community to an entirely different continent is a fantastically short sighted idea.

Moving geographically closer to something else is important if you need real-time savings (e.g. high frequency trading, scientific research). ActivityPub is an asynchronous communications protocol built upon technology with decent if occasionally dubious reliability. Doing something this drastic to shave off ~100ms is not correct.

auster@thebrainbin.org you’re right, the experience is definitely sub-par, and it’s because both Mastodon and the Threadiverse use the Announce activity for different purposes.

Mastodon uses it to boost posts to the feed (overriding existing logic re: replies being suppressed), and the Threadiverse uses it to keep different instances up to date.

It could be made better in that when a group actor announces a reply, Mastodon doesn’t promote it to the feed. Not sure if that’s easy to do.

In a nutshell, it’s because you don’t have to build the entire kit and kaboodle all at once.

Lots of BlueSky is centralized so you don’t have to worry about distribution, user, hosting, scaling, etc. and just focus on the frontend.

It’s the same reason why all the Lemmy and Mastodon apps look way better than the web versions, because all those other parts are no longer relevant and the creator(s) can focus on just putting out a polished product.

FYI all the Mastodon team is looking for feedback on featured collections (aka “starter packs”) so they may check in on this post 🙂

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that… unfortunately debugging server-to-server interactions is kind of tough. It should work though, so I don’t know why it didn’t… yet. It could be their version of NodeBB isn’t up to date enough.

cwsmith@community.darkscribes.com cwsmith@community.nodebb.org are you able to weigh in and let me know the NodeBB version? Could also be a privileges issue with the fediverse pseudo-user.

Also, a couple years back I lost basically all of my gaming clients to Discord.

Travesty. Discord pales in comparison to what forums can do.

So NodeBB and forums in general used to be pretty big in games, but not so much now.

Last one I know of is Sea of Thieves, but they don’t federate.

… yet? 😂

There are comparatively few instances that federate, since we are new to the activitypub game.

I made the decision that if you upgrade to v4, AP is turned off. Install a new instance of NodeBB, and ActivityPub is enabled out of the box.

Side effect of that would be all instances running prior to v4 won’t be federating, but at least there will be no surprises!

Here’s a list, but it’s not listed by topic or genre.

https://nodebb.fediverse.observer/list

Hey, yeah, please tell the Linux Nerds people to turn on federation!

Tell them Julian from NodeBB will help them get started 🤓

Your blogging options with federation are: WordPress, Ghost, and WriteFreely