Hi @andrew_s@piefed.social/@freamon and @nutomic@lemmy.ml —I'm working (not-so-secretly) on refactoring NodeBB so that it is able to "browse" remote audiences/group actors, and that would include things like PieFed and Lemmy communities.

N.B. Given varied nomenclature (group/category/community/subforum), the ForumWG calls this structure an "audience".

Where I am at now is working through the logic for slotting an object into a category.

The most obvious choice here would be to look at as:audience. It's even specified in 1b12, and the majority of threaded implementations follow 1b12.

I am making this post because nutomic explicitly removed the audience from being served in Lemmy (as of January this year), so I don't think relying on that property would be wise.

I asked in that issue whether Lemmy finds community via to/cc (it does). Does PieFed do the same?

Would this also open up the possibility of a topic/context being part of multiple audiences/communities? Interesting...

@panos brought up something interesting recently, which is that Lemmy communities don't boost everything (at least when viewed from Mastodon), but just the original post.

I wasn't sure whether this was intentional (because 1b12 definitely specifies that everything is boosted, replies and all). The only explanation I can think of is that 1b12 boosts activities, and Mastodon doesn't understand that, so it's actually an implementation quirk that causes Mastodon to not actually see the entire conversation.

NodeBB used to Announce(Note) and Announce(Create(Note)), and it meant that Mastodon was seeing everything. This was desirable from a synchronization standpoint, but it meant everything was going into Mastodon user feeds, which was @panos' concern.

I think Guppe (which is kind of like 1b12? Not sure) boosts everything, but again, am not 100% sure.

I am once again astounded by how unreasonably effective FEP 1b12 is at federating content completely.

On NodeBB I have a list of "popular" topics, which is mainly populated based on number of posts within a given time period. For most content from Mastodon-based servers, this supplies a decent signal of a given topic's popularity. The more people you follow, the more effective it is, but overall it's pretty shit at getting you the whole conversation.

Enter 1b12, Lemmy's preferred federation method. Follow a community actor and you start receiving everything that happens in that community. Replies, likes, the whole lot.

It also absolutely dominates my popular feed. It's all Lemmy stuff now because the Mastodon stuff literally can't compare.

Albeit the SNR is a tad lower, so give and take...

This is a spin-off discussion from today's ForumWG meeting

At today's ForumWG meeting, @trwnh@mastodon.social mentioned that Announce(Object) is something that Hubzilla and Friendica do, but the proper FEP 1b12 behaviour is to send out Announce(Activity).

I noted that NodeBB actually announces the Note object itself, instead of the activity, and provided some context that Discourse (via @angusmcleod@mastodon.social) originally expected Activities, but now also accepts objects (implicit create) for compatibility with NodeBB. Likewise, NodeBB also added some logic to handle Announce(Create(Note)) for compatibility.

Would Announce(Object) be considered a "variant" of 1b12, implemented within the spirit of the FEP, but not a technically compliant implementation?