I am an entrepreneur, small business owner, author, and researcher. I am also working on an open source project called Neuhub.
I am posting from Hubzilla with Neuhub via ActivityPub.
@Kichae Ideally, people should be notified that they are posting to a forum and not replying to a post on an individual channel, that way we can set some expectations in advance.
I am not sure how ActivityPub handles it, but Hubzilla somehow communicates with other Hubzilla instances that a particular channel is a forum. It’s probably communicated in webfinger, or something like that.
Just having an icon, tag, or Bootstrap-style badge next to a channel saying “forum” would be helpful.
What does Hubzilla have that gives them better tools to fight this?
By default, you only see posts from people you follow, and replies to their posts. And by replies, we mean replies to each particular thread.
Unlike Mastodon, all posts and replies are part of a thread (like a forum post or a Facebook-style social media post). Both the administrator and the person who started the thread can delete comments within that thread.
This also means you can unfollow specific conversations (threads) while continuing following someone’s channel.
With Mastodon, people can randomly mention you and you are notified of the post. With Hubzilla, this is turned off by default, although you can turn it on if you want. Spammers can’t spam you by mentioning you.
And then there are the various ways to block channels.
So spammers can’t get into your inbox very easily, and if they do, they are easy to block.
It would be nice if Direct Messages (DMs) or Private Messages (PMs) were treated like email and only sent to the people you are sending it to.
But generally, on most platforms, if you mention someone in the top level post, they are assumed to be on the recipient list. (Note, some platforms, like Mastodon, treat every post as if it were a top level post.)
Hubzilla has more privacy features, which prevents your messages from leaking to others, but part of that is because we use the Zot protocol between Hubzilla instances, and can set privacy at the thread level (i.e. the permissions of the top level post is the permissions for the entire thread).
When the same conversation is sent via ActivityPub, we lose a lot of control over the privacy of that post. We can and do address it to specific recipients, but other platforms don’t have the same types of access controls, which means we can’t enforce the access control list for that conversation on those platforms.
@NoiseColor It is mostly an issue that administrators have to handle, but if they don’t handle it, it starts spilling over into fediverse conversations.
Basically, a bunch of people create fake accounts for the purpose of sending spam or other nefarious purposes.
It takes up server space, and potentially contains illegal content. Basically stuff an admin does not want on their servers.
For reference, Hubzilla renders both the same way.
If you “share” someone’s post (what Mastodon users call a “quote post”) is basically just:
@channel@example.com [quote]Whatever they said.[/quote]
which gets translated to:
@channel@example.com<blockquote>Whatever they said.</blockquote>
If someone quotes someone’s post in a forum, it is the same exact thing.
And users can also add their own blockquotes to posts by using the BBCode [] tags too.
It’s all blockquotes.
Note: This posts uses <code> blocks. This may not render properly on all platforms.
t’s nothing like 15 minutes, but Lemmy doesn’t federate posts instantly either.
And for Hubzilla, it depends on the outgoing queue. It can range from instant to awhile.
But we can edit and delete our posts, and most major fediverse platforms will comply with our update and delete requests. But as users who understand a bit about decentralized social media, we understand that once it is sent, there is no guarantee that third parties will delete or update it. The average Threads user probably does not understand that yet.
Apparently they either don’t realize that there is a Update mechanism in ActivityPub that allows you to edit your post any time, or this is a temporary measure until they implement it.
I totally understand the issue with the number of hours in the day. I have a lot of projects going too.
I am working on creating an ecosystem of websites that all use Magic Signon (OpenWebAuth). Social media websites, forum communities, productivity apps, online courses, etc. You can use the same social identity to log into all of them.
The more projects that support it, the more people will use it.
A forum project like yours would make a great addition. :-)
Sounds great. Thank you for your work.
Not sure if you have plans on this, but implementation of FEP 61cf (Federated Single Signon) would be a game changer for forums.
With ActivityPub, people can follow remotely and get notifications. With OpenWebAuth, they can log in and participate with their existing Social Identity. It also lets them interact with posts that didn’t show up in their inbox.
Interesting. I received a repeat notification from @ActivityPub on my last comment. I suppose that is how you are acknowledging that my post was sent to people following that category. I like it.
Thanks for adding these. I was wondering how I could follow your forum and not just specific people.
It would be interesting to see how people would behave if you had both a “Disagree” and a “Low Quality” button. Would it make any difference, or would people who dislike it also hit the low quality button out of spite?