I would love to see integration with the fediverse. There's still a few forums I jump in on every once in a while, but it's so hard to keep up. I'd love it if I could see them here via federation
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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interoperability is the problem with this. what "integration with the fediverse" means practically for novel forms of software is "handling a trillion really annoying edge cases that Mastodon created for every other thing that isn't Mastodon." Lemmy, for example, handles interoperation with Mastodon incredibly poorly (and vice versa). you can do it, but for meaningful interaction it's not very good. and forums have their own sets of edge cases that would probably make, say, forum-to-Lemmy interoperation a giant mess.
I think they're similar enough where it could work, and thinking about it from mastodon too it's essentially just a long trail of messages. It wouldn't be a plugin system (I'm real sick of business people telling me to just 'plug in' my code), but I don't think it's impossible
the issue isn't really with federating messages per se (that's actually quite easy afaik, at least in federation terms), it's with how to display them and everything associated with them. my understanding--based off of the fact that i'm working on a project where we're having to fight how ActivityPub works, and how to display things is a big problem--is that ActivityPub is structured in a way you can be fast and loose with the stuff you're federating, and it's not a super big deal necessarily. but how it displays is a big deal, and that's a total mess. and a lot of that mess begins with how Mastodon does stuff and the need to accommodate its choices (which i think are mostly bad for anything that isn't microblogging, so non-microblog platforms have to design around it). it's then amplified by differences in front-ends and clients, none of which can agree exactly on how to display or handle things, and some of which can't/don't display certain things at all and create differing user experiences as a result.
how Mastodon handles content warnings, for instance, is a big problem. functionally it's just a details tag and i think in ActivityPub it's literally just a "summary" field. but the field is--in addition to being used as a details tag, a readmore, and a summary field--primarily used as the load bearing content warning functionality on Mastodon. so everything has to kind of assume the field will be used the way Mastodon uses it, which is... an issue, to say the least. obviously, not everything can handle that (or wants to handle that) the same way by design, so you get a bunch of differing ways to display the field that might not even contextually make sense for what's in it.
that's what the issue is with translating from Mastodon-to-Lemmy and vice versa, and likewise would probably be the difficulty with translating stuff from forum-to-Lemmy even in a best-case scenario. i'm not even sure what the best way to handle our conversation would be, for example, since forums are often chronological/basically never indent replies/exchanges, but Reddit-alikes like Lemmy allow for different ways of sorting thread replies and do indent exchanges.
this might not be too far off, i know flarum is planning to include activitypub in their 2.0 release and nodebb already has it working in test
That would be awesome!
Not just a working test, nodeBB 4 is in beta now. We're on the threshold
oh hell yeah
Discourse has got an ActivityPub plugin, but the forum owner needs to explicitly add it to their forum.
I went back to my old forum haunt after a 10 year absence recently, very surprised to see it's still kicking, though a bit less active. Nice to talk to some old friends lol
Quiet down, you don't want the bots or the AI scrapers to hear you.
MANY of the old places of the internet are still active, heavily overshadowed by the current centralized feudal web of 5 websites all with screenshots of each other but STILL alive. Hell, even IRC is still running, and i understand so does Usenet!
Usenet's mostly pirated stuff now.
IRC is a shadow of its former self, but if you're into FOSS it's still good.
The forum I belonged to (the brown room) which was full of people kicked/banned off the main forum (the blue room).
Eventually the owner of the site was jailed for trying to blow up n RC car under the car of his ex wife's partner.
Fucking dramallamas
Toyota FJ Cruiser was a wild place
I used to love forums back in the day, but I must say I’ve really gotten over the format of the medium. It promotes email-like long form responses with space used up with avatar images, handles and signature blocks. Nested replies become a nightmare steer several layer’s and you’re cooked on mobile.
Would love a Lemmy-like plugin to parse vBulletin forums. Endless scroll for topics, minimal non-content fluff, easy and quick replies. (The irony of this reply length isn’t lost on me. Most of my replies are short, promise!)
I love forums. I think they should stay the way they are. We just need to get people off Reddit and decentralize back to the relevant forums instead. . ok.
Most forum users have no interest in learning what a fediverse is