Notifications on remote interactions
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ActivityPub gives us the ability to send different activities (hence the name) across services.
Activities from remote users for three of those activities will now notify your local account:
- When someone likes your post (rendered as an upvote)
- When someone follows you
- When someone shares your post with their followers (shown as an event in-topic)
Those items were already notifying you (with exception of the last, which had no local equivalent), but now these notifications will also occur when involving users outside of the local NodeBB.
Replies to topics you follow currently do not notify you yet, as the logic behind that calculation is a tad more complicated, but will be the next item on the docket.
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@julian sorry for my ignorance , what is "replies to topics you follow" equivalent on mastodon?
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@crazycells there is no Mastodonian equivalent to that
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Do/will replies without a mention trigger notifications ...
- a NodeBB reply to a NodeBB topic (like this)?
- an ActivityPub reply to a NodeBB topic?
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@Jon-Pincus Yes for #1, because I started the topic (and for those who have participated), they automatically get notified
I am not sure about #2... when a reply comes in via ActivityPub, there is custom logic, so it didn't notify, but that might actually have changed with some updates I made this week.
But either way, even in that second case, a notification should still be sent.
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Here's a reply from Mastodon without mentioning you, so I guess we can find out
I'm not sure what the right behavior is for #2. One way of looking at it is that it doesn't matter where the reply comes from, people expect the same notification behavior. But then what about when some of the other replies in the thread are from Mastodon where the people *don't* expect to get notified? Tricky!
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Very nice! I replied to this from Mastodon as well, without mentioning you, so we can see what happens -- https://indieweb.social/@jdp23/112023876775557919
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@Jon-Pincus oh! Sorry. That won't show up here for one simple (any annoying) reason: nobody on here is following your account... so even though this belongs to the topic, Mastodon doesn't much care for context, and will only federate content out to the direct parent, and followers.
So it won't show up here... But let me rectify that somewhat by following you now
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@jdp23 I am replying to you via Mastodon, and I am followed by the NodeBB community account, so you post should then automatically get captured.
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@devnull I see, hmm, interesting ... that seems different than the behavior I'm used to on the fediverse but maybe I'm just confused about it.
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Julian Lamreplied to Jon on last edited by [email protected]
@jdp23 not necessarily, the originating instance doesn't always know the full conversation. I came to that realization yesterday and it kind of blew my mind.
Assuming no mentions and all separate instances:
A starts a topic and B replies, and if C replies to B but isn't followed by A, then A won't see it.
Isn't #ActivityPub fun?
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@devnull oh yeah that's totally mind-blowing, just unbelieveable that the fediverse has collectively decided "weird, but oh well, we just have to get used to it".
I *think* this wasn't exactly that case. It was A starts a topic, A replies, and B (me!) replied to A. But thinking about it more, I guess I never ever reply without a mention (because they wouldn't get a notification!) so I don't know how it would behave on pure Mastodon in this situation.
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@jdp23 yes that's correct, Mastodon sidesteps this with mention spamming (as long as OP or its instance continues to be mentioned).
Might be I'll have NodeBB always send the reply to OP's instance.
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Quick update: you are now able to mention individual users in your posts, and if you are mentioned in return, you will now be notified.
There was also a bug where remote user avatars were not showing up in your notification inbox. That has now been rectified.
