What would a federated helpdesk look like for federated platforms?* Shared KB articles, up and down voted across instances* Shared community Q&A forums (Ask, Best Answer format)* Shared support / moderation staff (?)Just a random brain buzz this mornin...

Jeff Sikes

What would a federated helpdesk look like for federated platforms?

* Shared KB articles, up and down voted across instances
* Shared community Q&A forums (Ask, Best Answer format)
* Shared support / moderation staff (?)

Just a random brain buzz this morning. Not sure it's any more helpful than something like joinmastodon.org and such.

#Fediverse

julian

Really good question! Forums have been a huge part of support for a long time. If you think back to the last time you needed help with something, and did a web search, chances are that between the LLM-generated and SEO-optimized trash, the most helpful site was a forum.

Real people, talking about real issues (no matter how small), with the conversation indexable in order to help future visitors.

Federation can break down the barrier to accessing forums, and further participation. If you stumbled upon an AP-enabled forum, you could theoretically click a button, and be redirected to that same topic, but on your home instance (whether it be another NodeBB, /kbin, Mastodon, etc.) and immediately contribute.

AP even has support for "Question", but that got co-opted by Mastodon for their polling implementation, so I am not entirely certain what Q&A (which NodeBB does support!) would look like federated.

@[email protected]

Jeff Sikes

@julian I just setup two ZenDesk instances for the day job and we definitely see how useful KB and forums are in reducing the number of support requests that get created (we never had them prior).

One issue with forums is it does come with additional moderation requirements - at a small org with few resources but tons of customers, that can be a challenge.

Initially we went live with liking, following and disliking KB articles and that has been great feedback.

julian

Actually, @[email protected] had some interesting ideas when he played around with this concept back in late 2023.

Specifically collapsing an entire topic tree into a linear style has potential readability issues with out of band posts especially if the topic tree is very wide, so he played with the idea of automatically "quoting" a post if it didn't immediately follow its parent.

@[email protected]

Leroy

@julian @box464 Thanks for remembering me!

I have attached an image of the auto-quote for a single thread view.

However, I have since focused on the multi-thread view instead as people prefer that and dev time is limited (had zero time for this in probably a couple of months).

But happy to chat more about it, because I really want to get back to it.

Leroy

But yeah, one of the big benefits is that a company/community can create a forum for their product/tool and anyone with a fediverse account can get help without having to register a new account with every new tool you use.

I think it’s the true way to break the inertia that Reddit has over forums.

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @leroy @box464 i feel like linear models really only work for imageboard-style chronological ordering. trying to collapse a tree into a line *can* be done (look at reddit), but it's really hard to get a good result

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @box464 Question can be used as an activity instead of as an object. Mastodon's usage wraps it in a Create, so you could maybe just not do that.