Are you on Mastodon? Share your handles here!
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After hearing about it many times in the past couple months, I finally bit the bullet and signed up for an account on a locally-run server.
N.B. "locally" is relative, I suppose. The server is actually in Edmonton, so if you consider three provinces over as "local", then so be it!
NodeBB itself hasn't had much Twitter presence, and while people have tagged us in the past, we do not really consider it an avenue for support. To that end, I ended up also creating an account for nodebb, which I will be using as another way to propagate our posts in the NodeBB Development category.
Have you tried Mastodon? What do you think?
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Well, then of that, you and I are in agreement. I'm not necessarily one for the quintessential use-case Twitter — mindlessly broadcasting every meaningless thought that comes into your brain.
I do, however, often find that I sometimes have thoughts that I'd like to share (to nobody in particular), that don't warrant a full blog post (that I also write to nobody in particular).
So in that sense, it fills that niche.
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While we're on the subject of Mastodon, have you guys considered the possibilty of ActivityPub integration for nodeBB? I think it would be a good fit, no?
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@julian I'm no expert either, but at least on the surface it looks very appealing. Being able to join a larger ecosystem of like-minded communities while maintaining autonomy is a great model. I have to do some more research, but perhaps a good start would be by publishing ActivityPub feeds much like the current RSS feeds.
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Thanks @razibal. As I understand it, the integration with ActivityPub can be as deep or as light as you want.
The main hurdle is updating our backend to understand that actions can come from outside of the instance itself.
e.g. if I upvote a post, then my
uidis saved in the list of upvotes for thatpid, but what if theuidis actually[email protected]?
You're right, an ActivityPub feed would be a great way to dip our toes in the water.
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My main focus for diving into this is to answer the question: how can we make starting forums suck less?
The focus is on building a community, getting your first users, etc... what if the community is already established (the fediverse), and you didn't even have to think about any of those, or conversely, what if getting your forum off the ground were not as make-or-break as it is now?
The possibilities...
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So I've been thinking about this since 2012 as a non-coder, and @julian might remember about 3 years ago I was musing over Time Berners Lee Solid Pods concept I think based in Node.js and is now offered as https://www.inrupt.com, at the tine I found this interesting and seemed to encapsulate what i was looking for, but no one was really understanding the concept fully or why I was looking at this, but here we are now and Mastodon seems to have lit that fire under many asses at once.
I came across the activitypub recently too and it seemed to be similar kinda, but I'm not sure yet as have not fully dug into it.
My originating ideas probably better classed as user <> www <> server(s)
My main concept was a user retains all their original data in their possession, and being able to publish and control from one point, publish that info across multiple platforms all at once, and retain control over edits, removals etc., every platform could require individual negation which the user coudl manage again the permission etc. from their console app/platform (this would include a monetisation system) - is this what ActivityPub allows?
Since all those years ago, there are some offering or tapping into this original thought space. My thinking was market need (user need and traditional journalism to some degree) as publishing industry hadn't really cracked the net back in 2012 IMHO and was floundering, how to monetise content etc., well I thought, take out the publishing houses for good (middle men) and put it all in the lap of the content creator.
Eventually after the era of social media wildfire, services like substack.com and maybe tips in brave began to inhabit a similar or the same space of that original thought space. The thing that has always struck me NodeBB, it has the capacity to also be the platform for such user use cases too.
There is a focus obviously on managing more than one user, a group discussion, the original forum concept, but I would propose inverting the outlook and running a parallel track and thinking about NodeBB for the single user case applications.
As for make starting forums suck less, well some of that is considered above, but needs clear conceptual again another thing on my mind for many years, but oh boy, I'lm gonna stop right here for now.
