@[email protected] said in The unreasonable effectiveness of 1b12:

i also would prefer something more browsable

Absolutely

That's in a nutshell what I'd like to achieve in 2025. The building blocks are nearly all there.

A lot of the effort I'm championing with the ForumWG deals with combating the inability for Mastodon (and other non-1b12 implementors) to federate content thoroughly. A lot of that is due to design decisions that were thoughtfully made, so this isn't a critique, per se.

It really does highlight that 1b12 is actually quite good at what it does (federating content out), and that 7888, et al., would be a great complement for post-hoc backfill.

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...

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I think that makes sense considering that outboxes already do contain activities, so it's not a stretch from prior art.

I'd also like to know the thinking behind excluding root-level post from the context collection. I think it belongs within, but other software may consider root level objects to be like "topics", and so would be on a separate level from replies. The easiest example I can think of right now is Lemmy, which is how it handles posts.

@bboctt oh lord!!

The ever-lasting battle between compatibility and adoption of new features.

At the end of the day, supporting older browsers gives us enough developer friction as to become a no-go. That's not to mean that it isn't important, but unfortunately that the market share isn't there for us to spend a significant amount of time on it.

But let's say... if a big bank came to us and said "This forum needs to work on IE11!!", and was going to spend the dollars to get the software there, then that is a different story.

On the upside, though, there are a couple small things we can try to address. The site's client-side js shouldn't immediately crash... stuff should work. It may be worth investing some time into getting the baseline functionality working, if it isn't already.

@bh4-tech said in Testing federation:

@[email protected]

Good lord, what is @[email protected]? What an address!

@eeeee correct, the wording is a bit different. So while posts and topics you can "delete" and then "purge", with categories, you're "disabling", and then "purging".

Whatever, just the same. Categories don't need to be disabled before being purged.

What shows up in the dev console when you click "purge category"? It should open a modal.

@eeee I just checked the template, the button should never be greyed out

@eeeee This menu option?

Odd that it's greyed out, probably means there's a precondition that wasn't satisfied...

@eeeee said in Efficient way to increase World posts on a topic?:

(2) When I follow someone from a Mastodon site, I seem to be following a clone of their account. I.e. account created 8 Nov 2022, 00:00, 1 post.
Not their mastodon profile with many posts and followers

When you query a remote user, they are given a local representation in NodeBB. The creation date is different because it cannot always be trusted. If a remote user reports their creation date as 1 Jan 2588, I don't think that would be correct... but it is allowed in ActivityPub to do that — so I just use the date they were first queried.

@eeeee the way ActivityPub works is as you surmised, via follow relationships. I detail that bit here in the documentation, which I think you've read.

So the way Ive been expanding the World, is by going to mastodon, searching topic, either by tag or by name. Then if I see an interesting profile, I reply to one of their posts with cc'ing in my nodebb account.
Then their post comes up in World on nodebb, and I can follow the author.

To shortcut this, you can search either the author (@handle@domain) or post URL in NodeBB. From there, NodeBB will attempt to pull that content in via ActivityPub, so you don't need to reply to them.

Is there a faster way? E.g. is there a method to type a topic in nodebb World, and see relevant posts or people there, and follow them immediately?

Unfortunately not, since ActivityPub isn't built in a centralized way that allows for something like this. I face similar issues with the OpenBeta community. The rock climbing community is around on fedi, but finding them is tough. I do as you do, I follow people who post about climbing related content and over time my /world tends to populate with their content automatically.

What I also do on my site is follow a hashtag. In my case, #climbing. When followed, any new topics that are posted with that hashtag notify you, so you can move them out of world, etc.

Lemmy communities are also great to follow, because they automatically boost everything that happens in their community, so you can get access to everything that happens in that lemmy community automatically. (e.g. I follow @[email protected] here, and their posts show up in world automatically).

Lastly, I also follow a newsmast channel, @[email protected], which also boosts a ton of related content. There is probably one for technology.

@sketchucation you should install v1.3.3 of the plugin. We can debug further as to why the plugin is not working after that version is installed.

@[email protected] I would think that FEP-7888 merely suggests that as:context be used to group objects, although I think an implementation using it to group activities would be considered compliant. (@[email protected] to comment?)

I don't see why a top-level post linking to its conversation container would need to use a property separate from as:context. It sounds like you consider the conversation container and the collection of posts to be separate entities, but that needn't be the case, they can be one and the same, unless I am misunderstanding.

Last time ForumWG met we voted to recommend that individual objects use as:context. There is no additional guidance at this time as to what it points to or whether it should resolve (although that would be a logical next step).

@sketchucation okay, so nbbpm reports this:

The plugin author suggests that you install v1.3.3 for your copy of NodeBB v3.12.1

This is correct. For your version of NodeBB, you are supposed to install v1.3.3. The 2.x branch of link-preview is meant for NodeBB v4.

@sketchucation if you've installed v2.0.13, then that is the latest version. Make sure that you run ./nodebb build after activating it.

Are you able to access the settings page for that plugin?

Lastly, what do you mean when you say you have installed the latest version of NodeBB? Please let me know the version number. v3.12.1

@sketchucation support is available with our hosting plans. Community installs would be supported through this forum

Perhaps there is an issue with the package manager. I will have to look into it.

@sketchucation you should be able to install the latest version from the command line

You can use console.log and see output in the nodebb logs, vscode debugger also works and let's you step through code and see the data. Below is my launch.json file for vscode debugging.

{
	// Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
	// Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
	// For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
	"version": "0.2.0",
	"configurations": [
		{
			"type": "node",
			"request": "launch",
			"name": "NodeBB",
			"skipFiles": [
				"${workspaceFolder}\\node_modules\\**\\*.js",
				"${workspaceFolder}\\src\\promisify.js",
				"<node_internals>/**"
			],
			"program": "${workspaceFolder}\\app.js",
			"runtimeArgs": [
				"--trace-warnings",
				"--stack-trace-limit=200"
			]
		}
	]
}

If you are debugging a plugin/theme in node_modules folder remove the node_modules part from skipFiles

Posting this again https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-widget-essentials/commit/d73fdb2d90d6359b22b9d1c50bafb56ac2b0c038 so you can compare your code to a working widget.

@codenamejessica, no worries. When you are building a nodebb theme/plugin for the first time there is definitely a learning curve.

Looks like you got the widget working. The reason it's not showing any users is because you set the data to the field posters but your template is using {{{ each users }}}