FOSDEM offers open source and free software developers a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Renowned for being highly developer-oriented, the event brings together some 8000+ geeks from all over the world.

The twenty-fifth edition will take place on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd February 2025 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

So, should NodeBB make an appearance at next year's FOSDEM?

There's apparently a dev room for ActivityPub, which should prove interesting for sure!

@AbhishekRH Have you tried the sso-oauth2-multiple plugin? It might be compatible with a keycloak server.

NodeBB works on nodejs 18/20/22 so it's probably not a nodejs version issue.

You are still on the root account.

@[email protected] then maybe it was this janky old forum software called NodeBB that didn't support it.

Wouldn't that be ironic

(in all seriousness, NodeBB didn't support it at first, but it does now... maybe it's fine now).

@[email protected] said in Minutes from 7 November 2024 WG Meeting:

So the appropriate way for Mastodon to support Article-type objects can only include no longer "sanitising" all the formatting out of them and finally allowing a much, much larger subset of HTML formatting, explicitly including an unlimited number of embedded inline images.

That is exactly what @[email protected]'s PR aims to accomplish. Core members of the Mastodon dev team (namely @[email protected] and @[email protected]) have been gracious enough to explore this opportunity to have Mastodon treat non-note objects with a kinder approach, one that we are more than happy to work with them on.

I bet that they are also tired of having the same conversations about handling non-note objects. I think I am already responsible for at least two of them

Will they support inline images? That is one point I expect to be sticky. We shall see.

One thing I will say is that Mastodon in the years since your history has expanded their support for long-form post content, which paves the way for moving the baseline behaviour even more so toward a level that other implementors would be happier with.

My end goal here is not that Mastodon should natively support every object type under the sun. However, other implementors should not feel the need to translate their content into as:Note in order to be consumed by a significant portion of the fediverse.

Nevertheless, thank you for providing your written history on the subject, it is always helpful to be reminded.

@[email protected] In the interest of keeping the outgoing PR as small as possible, I would even kick the can down the road and keep it to 4 (postpone the discussion) for now.

Implementing something like this would be good enough for the time being

There are additional pictures in this post, click here to view the original article.

@[email protected] depends, from what and to what?

The whole data migration part is tricky because nobody's going to build out tools to easily migrate your content out.

For example, we have the tooling to migrate a bunch of forums over to NodeBB (phpBB, vBulletin, Discourse, etc.), and I would bet that Discourse has a NodeBB import tool.

But we don't collaborate on this because it is bad for business...

@juse please run npm install again and try running ./nodebb build again.

I'm not familiar with that error, but you can try a few things.

Don't use root user to run nodebb commands, make sure the nodebb folder is owned by a nonprivileged user. Then run npm install with that user and try running ./nodebb build again.

What is the output of ./nodebb plugins? Seems like you don't have nodebb-plugin-composer-default active.

nodebb.min.js is generated when you run ./nodebb build in the nodebb folder. Try running it and see if you get any errors. Also make sure you access the forum with the same url used in config.json

@Ben-Stokes oauth2-multiple is just newer and doesn't require the dev to fork the plugin.

You just install it and configure the information inside the ACP settings page.

Give that a shot instead?

@[email protected] @[email protected] iirc some implementations don't handle the activity well (was it Mastodon?) so NodeBB sends both the base object and the activity wrapper in two separate calls.

@[email protected] nice tip! I'll give that a shot.

@[email protected] Correct. NodeBB does handle deletes (barring some regression), and it likely wasn't federated to me.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Nick is right, it depends on whether the Mastodon instance has authorized_fetch enabled, which enforces the HTTP Signature checking on GETs.

tech.lgbt is one instance that has it turned on, so you can use that for testing.

For me, I just sign everything, including GETs. The overhead is pretty minimal.

@[email protected] That's fair, and it'll all be clear in hindsight, but one thing that doesn't quite work in your parallel is that hip-hop and rock artists certainly didn't keep their own kids from listening to their work — hell, they probably encouraged it.

Ask 10 cigarette execs, and you'll likely find that all ten will keep their kids away from cigarettes.

The fact that actual, real, Facebook/Twitter/etc. employees keep their kids away from social media is a pretty alarming signal.

@[email protected] @[email protected] For what it's worth, your post was preserved here: https://community.nodebb.org/post/https%3A%2F%2Ftechhub.social%2Fusers%2FRaccoon%2Fstatuses%2F113505643629004272

So the content is preserved!

The full minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force monthly meeting (held on 7 November) can be found at this Google Docs link

Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.

Of note:

SWICG ForumWG GitHub repo used to keep track of high level discussion items

• Repo url: https://github.com/swicg/forums
• Issue tracker contains details regarding high-level items discussed at monthly meetings (and on the fediverse between meetings)
• Very early draft report of Conversational Contexts in ActivityPub accessible at https://swicg.github.io/forums/ — just headers and an intro so far

Mastodon and its treatment of non-note items

• Darius Kazemi (@[email protected]) of Hometown put together a light fork of Mastodon that could be merged upstream. It utilises the "read more" functionality to display longer-form content and runs the content of non-note objects through the same parsing that regular notes get.
• Emphasizes that it is not an open PR yet, while discussions are ongoing with Renaud and the Mastodon team. "This is 118 lines of code, touches 4 files. Not huge."
• Some edge cases: How do we handle additional media beyond the cap of 4 currently in place by Mastodon?
• Emelia (@[email protected]) also brings up concerns re: text-field length and a sensible maximum across implementations.
• Evan (@[email protected]) brings up the possibility of this PR making it into Mastodon 4.4, Claire (@[email protected]) acknowleges the possibility
• Darius will write up a summarization and demo video for presentation to the Mastodon team

FEP 7888 and 76ea

• There are still outstanding conflicts between FEPs 7888 and 76ea
  • Beyond the main difference (7888 uses as:context, 76ea uses thr:threads under a new namespace), some philosphical differences persist.
  • e.g. whether the 76ea's definition of an explicit "reply tree" is adequate to describe the multitude of shapes that a conversation can take
• a (@[email protected]) and Evan informally pledge to work together to come to a resolution

Voting re: FEP convergence

• A motion was made by Julian to defer a subsequent motion regarding FEP convergence to a later to-be-determined date pending resolution of the 7888/76ea conflict
• Majority abstained, with two ayes. Resolved.

Context collection items: activities or objects?

• Julian: should a resolvable context collection contain activities (create, like, EmojiReact, etc.), or simple objects?
• Evan makes the case that simpler is better (needing to diff. activities may present a complication for implementors)
• a suggests a reframing as a two-way negotiation of what gets declared vs. approved
• This topic was cut short due to timing