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!

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.

I tried to sync @[email protected] with @testing-ground.

@julian said in Is ActivityPub too complicated?: > Let me look into nodebb-to-nodebb folllowing, that definitely should be working!

Have you had a chance to 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.