Hey @MDN, with Stack Overflow’s ongoing community implosion, now would be an excellent time to launch MDN Answers so people have a better place to help each other learn.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] yep, we've been working on federation this year.

We're watching the implosion of StackOverflow with interest and would help facilitate a federated alternative if there is interest.

wakest ⁂

@julian @thisismissem @Jeremiah @flyboy there is definitely interest, I have seen like 20 people post "is there a fediverse alternative to StackExchange?" this week

julian

@[email protected] honestly I'm interested in this purely just to see how badly Mastodon will muck things up if I start sending NodeBB Q&A topics as a Question activity, because Mastodon currently uses it for Polls.

But they don't have a monopoly on using it, and I can make the argument that my use case is more in spirit to the protocol

julian

@[email protected] oh I know, I'll send a Question activity, and all of the answers won't be text (as Mastodon expects, but uris to as:Note) hahahah

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian mastodon doesn't use the Question activity type.. at lesst not in a way that would expect things to break

It supports receiving Question, but it's mostly processed as Note, it'll only create a poll if there's anyOf or oneOf present.

On the sending side, it'll send Question instead of Note if it has a poll attached.

Jenniferplusplus

@julian @liaizon It seems like they would be pretty easy to distinguish heuristically. A Question that bundles in multiple Answers is a poll. A Question that doesn't, or that links to an Answer, is a Q&A.

Although my preference would be for a, @/context entry that clarifies the semantics

julian

@[email protected] theoretically a Q&A site would bundle in answers, so we'd send anyOf or oneOf too!

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian though oddly it expects, I think, Create(Question) instead of Question (which is an activity in of itself)

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian then you might get some weirdness, because for that I think you'd be sending an IRI to another object, where Mastodon expects poll options to be inline: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/lib/activitypub/parser/poll_parser.rb

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian arguably there's a possibility of a bug there where valid? will return true because items is an array, but options could resolve to an empty array (i.e., no "name" or "content" property on the item because it's a string & not an object

So the answer there would be to valid the values in items (anyOf/allOf) as being objects with a specific shape & type.

julian

@[email protected]

(That's an imp smiling emoji btw, Mastodon strips it out because we send inline images)...

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian perhaps you could go as far as limiting poll options (Note's in anyOf / oneOf) as requiring to be a single line of text in name or content?

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian also, looks like if you send Mastodon a Question (top level, no wrapping Create), it may ignore it (will if my reading is correct).