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

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

I suppose, although in that scenario theoretically one could add as:sensitive to mark the status as CW’d? I don’t think CW logic is even run for non-Notes at the moment, though I could be mistaken.

Not necessarily, no. Content warnings were implemented in Mastodon specifically as summary plus sensitive=true. Perhaps not originally, but that is enforced now (all CW’d posts from Mastodon are marked sensitive). Might be Mastodon will CW notes that don’t have sensitive, out of caution, but this doesn’t apply to non-Notes.

So a summary included in a non-Note is not CW’d by Mastodon currently.

Thanks. Yes, this is just how Mastodon renders content from Lemmy and Piefed at the moment.

Mastodon sees something that is not a Note, and says “I will treat it using a fallback mechanism. If it has a title, it is added to the top, I will add the URL back to the site at the bottom. If it has a summary, I will use that as the content”

Note that it does not use content, that’s why there’s no actual content. This is why the link preview also links back to Lemmy, not to the article itself.

nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social can add this to their software, respectively, by populating summary. It can just be a copy of content, or it can be a summarization… or it could be the link to the article… anything goes really.

otter@lemmy.ca perhaps the quote posts are not related but some other changes bundled in that version release are?

Can you share the instance that user was on? It’s worth checking out how their instance sees your post.

Mastodon did improve some non-Note handling characteristics, so it could be related!

Everyone’s hilariously ragging on OP for setting up a federated instance with dubious uptime, and I’m sittin’ here thinking that it just reminds me of me when I was a young kid hacking around with software.

Back then I set up a mediawiki server with very dubious uptime. Was fun 😂

It’s a good approach, it’s exactly how NodeBB operates as well.

We have a FOSS software and we sell managed services for those who don’t have the technical know-how.

Win-win.

Can you not call fetch() to do a HEAD call? Maybe I’m mistaken about it but it should be ok.

CORS is indeed a wrench that gets thrown in when you least expect it…

It took me a minute to find, but it is detailed in evan@cosocial.ca’s write up about HTTP Discovery of ActivityPub Objects.

This is probably exactly what you’re looking for.

https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-html-discovery/

I think your current approach has merit but is limited. If you know the instance software by URL and can resolve it using path matching without the use of a pre-flight request, that’s absolutely a better way forward. The downside is you have to know the URL patterns of every software. You’ll never “catch 'em all”!

However, if that method fails, doing a pre-flight check to grab Link also works and is a viable way forward.

You can test against NodeBB users or posts.

admiralpatrick@lemmy.world I think you would be better served by checking for the Link header. NodeBB and WordPress do it, if that gives you some idea of implementation?

> is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

You’re not wrong about that. Threadiverse software (Lemmy, Piefed, and NodeBB too) use something called 1b12 to synchronize content between instances.

If you follow a community, you set up the synchronization from your server to that community from that point forwards.

This is similar, but not quite backfill, which is what happens if you follow a community mid-way and don’t have any of that stuff from before.

Also you can’t 1b12 synchronize with Mastodon, so that unfortunately is a dead-end, but you would hopefully be able to backfill from Mastodon.

Thanks for the link back, I appreciate it!

One neat side effect of this is that if the microblogiverse backfills from the threadiverse, and vice versa, then you have in effect built a bridge connecting the two disparate 'verses.

We’re not there yet — this step only exposes conversational contexts so that consumers (like NodeBB) can backfill from them. Neither Lemmy nor Piefed have signalled intent to consume contexts yet, but as it is a relatively new extension, there is no telling what may happen in a week, a month, a year… :)

Also rimu@piefed.social is pretty darn responsive and if you as (very) nicely that would go a long way.

Those are all very good questions, and exactly the sort of things that would be discussed at the ForumWG.

Backfill is just one of the things (the main thing, currently) we touch on, but one of the more important ones, because the potential to ensure you have the entire conversation is important from a data completeness standpoint.

The thing to remember is that there’s no one “owner” of a conversation. Right now it’s a pretty loose association… individual posts and notes can declare that they are part of a context, even if that isn’t the case. This beats the current system where there is no association at all.

The difference here is that as a consumer of backfill, I can actually go to the context and verify this. We can extend this later on with context ownership, and defer responsibilities like moderation, interaction policies, forking/merging, etc.

The long view of this is we intend to increasingly solidify the association between context and object over time.