Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports

Sylwester Cyba

Error 405 Not Allowed after trying to reply and hitting Submit button.

julian

@nhl.pl That's a weird one, are you still seeing that issue when replying to that topic? I wonder if it was a transient error.

julian

@the-skyfoxx said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

When you click on the world/all icon, the world/curated icon also highlights

Thanks, given that I'm going to remove the /world/all route altogether, this should no longer be an issue

Sylwester Cyba

Invalid API call when trying to bookmark one of the posts from World (All).

Sylwester Cyba

Sorting changed from default to Newest to Oldest.
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/d35644c9-5820-49a6-9b85-9b5673acdfa4/morning-i-hope-your-day-is-awesome/2?_=1713379891143&sort=newest_to_oldest

Issues:

wrong time for Last reply near to 7 Replies dropdown menu - 12 hours ago when latest reply timestamp shows 4 hours ago,
7 Replies after expanding them are sorted Oldest to Newest when posts below them are sorted Newest to Oldest as requested.

Both things work as intended outside World (All) within normal topics not related to ActivityPub.

Sylwester Cyba

ActivityPub user profile > Flag Profile window:

It looks to be an API call and returns {"errors":["Bad request"]}. /ap/actor/ae0fea90a57bf109abf03f47806c7285 tells nothing to end user so it would be nice to change it to something familiar for local community or Fediverse handle.

hellekin

@angus, @devnull I think this is a bug report

julian

@[email protected] yes, it was posted on the NodeBB community and is related to it's integration there

crazycells

hi @julian , I wonder how search engines and SEO will work for federated posts? Let's say I published a post specific to forum-1 on forum-1, however since it is federated out, the same posts and topic can be found on 10+ more websites simultaneously... and let's assume forum-2 is higher ranked on search engines for some reasons...

when people are searching related keywords on search engines, will they be directed to forum-1? or forum-2, namely the forum that search engine favors/ranks higher?

julian

@crazycells That's a good question, and not one I'm sure I have the answer for.

It's something I wonder about because it has been said that search engines will penalize sites that contain repetitive content. Does that mean we may see downweighting because federated content can be found word-for-word elsewhere? I don't know.

I think what might be a good practice would be for a site to refer back to the original site if available.

For example, if you inspect the source for this topic, you'll see that it contains a canonical reference:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17867/pre-alpha-activitypub-related-bug-reports?page=3" />

If this topic appears elsewhere (and it does, on the ActivityPub SocialHub), then it would be better if that site also provided a canonical reference back to community.nodebb.org, but that's not a requirement anywhere at this point in time.

That way, a search engine upon encountering a site, would be able to learn the appropriate original source and weight it accordingly.

crazycells

@julian thanks for the answer. my guess is that since google or bing do not have any contribution to the fediverse or any activitypub adopting sites (or do they?), maybe they will simply not care enough or change anything about their calculations... lol...

additionally, I believe there is this bug ... edited federated posts are not updated on other sites? This is what it looks like on mastodon social however I have edited the second to the last word as ranks 4 days ago?

Screenshot 2024-04-26 at 16.00.49.png

crazycells

@julian additionally, I have just checked "ActivityPub SocialHub" , my edited post is not updated there either...

and here -originally- I just made a comment in a topic, but there it looks like I opened a new topic... and with a very ugly title is this because you have adjusted it that way?

Screenshot 2024-04-26 at 16.17.45.png

julian

@crazycells said:

originally- I just made a comment in a topic, but there it looks like I opened a new topic

That one's because SocialHub (more specifically, Discourse's implementation of ActivityPub) does not automatically traverse up the reply-chain to discover the original post. The original topic pre-dates @[email protected] and I syncing the categories together, so SocialHub does not know about the other posts in this topic. In that scenario, it will create a new topic like you saw.

julian

@crazycells said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

edited federated posts are not updated on other sites?

We're sending the appropriate activity out (an Update activity) whenever a post edit takes place.

I believe @oplik0 worked on this a bit, so if there are issues perhaps he may be able to speak to that.

However there is no guarantee that updates are properly handled across the fediverse. Best effort, I guess

Steve Bate

Hi @devnull . I haven't been following the forum topic federation discussions very closely, so this may be a silly question. Are forum topics going to be fully federated or just replicated (which is not quite the same thing, even for 2-way sync)? For example, if in the future there are 1000's of NodeBB instances running and there's a topic X, is it possible that the posts for that topic could be coming from multiple NodeBB instances (or other instance implementations)? If so, a topic-level canonical link will not work. Google currently indexes individual Mastodon posts (at least some of them, not sure about all of them). The AP Note identifier is the canonical URL in this case. (Google also indexes actor profiles in some cases, but that's a different discussion. ) FWIW, this is the canonical link I see for this topic: I'm guessing the canonical link you quoted is on the NodeBB side? Since these are different canonical links, I'd expect that Google will consider these (SocialHub and NodeBB topics) to be different web resources with mostly replicated content.

crazycells

@julian said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

@crazycells said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

edited federated posts are not updated on other sites?

We're sending the appropriate activity out (an Update activity) whenever a post edit takes place.

I believe @oplik0 worked on this a bit, so if there are issues perhaps he may be able to speak to that.

However there is no guarantee that updates are properly handled across the fediverse. Best effort, I guess

thank you for your efforts. are likes and dislikes on a post also federated out?

crazycells

@[email protected] hmm... I cannot see the canonical link you posted here...

thanks for the explanation, if I understand it correctly, this means that search engines will probably penalize the websites for federation with the current settings, right?

julian

@crazycells it may, it may not, nobody knows exactly how search engines rank sites

the skyfoxx

from from - repeated word

julian

@[email protected] said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

Are forum topics going to be fully federated or just replicated (which is not quite the same thing, even for 2-way sync)?

Fully federated, if I am able to. That statement means that if two categories are synchronized, be they NodeBB, Discourse, or Flarum, responses to one would end up propagating over to the other and vice versa. Things like likes would propagate through.

I haven't quite thought through the potential implications of changing rel="canonical", so there are probably gaps in my logic. Maybe rel="alternate" is a better fit.