Not only is it exciting that they're adding ActivityPub support, but its great that they're basing their implementation off of Lemmy. Up til now, most implementations have been from scratch and implement federation after the project has gotten up and running and then do federation testing. That leads to different assumptions about models/flows and inconsistencies and hacks to get it working. Working off of another implementation's federation guide will mean less hacks but still leave room for impl-specific features and workflows.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2023
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@LemmyDev is truly contributing to evolve the #Fediverse. They take care to craft good documentation, have created a separate #Rust project for #ActivityPub, are participating in the #SocialHub developer community, and contributing to the #FEP process.
E.g. thanks to #Lemmy we have standardization for support of AP Groups, for instance.
In other words, they lead by example :)
I encourage any fedi dev to do the same..
@cypherpunks I see some acid comments there, but I'm really glad to see this happening! I'm definitely not up to writing something like this from scratch, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that I could contribute improvements later.
Being able to follow my own discourse instances from mastodon and boost then directly will be an awesome start. And there's lots of room to grow the integration over time.
I agree. While the initial implementation proposal is hardly better than an RSS feed bot on Mastodon, it does lay the groundwork for true ActivityPub federation it seems. Discourse is a large complex software; Federation will not happen over night.
@poVoq I think it's noticeably better than an RSS feed bot merely as described; it won't require a bot polling, should have immediate delivery, and it will be manageable from within Discourse configuration.
Additionally, it looks like it would not be much work to extend it to support inReplyTo so that responses in Discourse show up as threads.
There's been a lot of conversation on meta.discourse.org about how bidirectional federation could work reasonably within Discourse's design eventually, and I think I'd be interested in that direction, but I'll also note that Discourse can be configured to enhance searchability and at least on the instances I run, it is configured that way because being able to discover the information is the point. Anyone pushing for full bidirectional sync between the Fediverse and Discourse should keep this in mind before complaining about the lack of full bidirectional integration.
@cypherpunks Closing the loop, here's the announcement on the #Discourse side:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/87?u=mcdanlj
omg, that's huge, right?
@cypherpunks
>Any action related to the post in Mastodon does not appear in Discourse.
>Any action related to the post in Discourse does not appear in Mastodon.
What's the point then?
I'm mostly interested in discourse communities being able to communicate with one another.
IIUC, for now, it will just be that Mastodon users can follow a category on a Discord site, which means that they will see when new topics (threads) are created there (along with an excerpt of the initial post in each topic).
@cypherpunks So, no different from RSS or Atom?
basically, yeah. but mastodon can't subscribe to rss/atom feeds, so (butterfly meme) is this... progress? 🤷
I'd be more interested in connecting lemmy with discourse, as it's a more natural fit, and I'm assuming easier too since they're partially copying lemmy's approach.
@Hyolobrika @cypherpunks fediverse isn't solely for microblogging and forum posts aren't that
@Moon @cypherpunks "isn't" or "is"? Because it isn't, but I can't make sense of your post otherwise.
@Hyolobrika @cypherpunks sorry if my post was confusing. what i mean is that the fediverse can have many types of activities on it, and some of those types are not relevant to display on a microblogging platform like mastodon.
@Moon @cypherpunks That makes sense I suppose. So I guess it's just for Discourse-to-Discourse (or Lemmy) federation. Doesn't seem from a quick skim to mention that though.
@Hyolobrika @cypherpunks forum-to-forum seems reasonable, if it was literally only discourse-to-discourse it would feel like a waste.
@cypherpunks it's pretty limited, but that's logical when the aim is to get people into the garden. I expect this to be a fairly common thing moving forward.
Medium is taking more of a hybrid tack, but I could see Tumblr moving this direction when they fully announce their plans.
(I'm not saying it's bad ~ websites gotta traffic or there's no point)
@cypherpunks looks like embrace, extend, extinguish
@stevelord @cypherpunks discourse is open source. In fact, many open source projects actually use it as a forum-software
@farshidhakimy @cypherpunks That has absolutely no bearing on anything. "They do the bare minimum to not be like everyone else" is not the panacea you think it is. Read the thread. The integration is one-way.
Note that Support for incoming content (e.g. posts on Mastodon etc being imported into Discourse) is intentionally excluded. It will be possible to add this in a later version.
Support for following users (as opposed to categories) is also intentionally excluded.
Sees an excerpt of the first post of all FDC topics (posted after they subscribe) in their Mastodon feed, each with a link back to the associated topic, e.g. “Discuss on our forum”.
Any action related to the post in Mastodon does not appear in Discourse.
Any action related to the post in Discourse does not appear in Mastodon.
Oh. So it's Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.
No thanks.