Posting in Activity pub
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@crazycells and me. Don't really fancy endorsing Musk....
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Ok thanks @crazycells
How does a user on NodeBB community manage the federation of their content? Do we have a management panel in profile or ???????If nothing exists, then a native user of a forum should at least be able to have an option like:
Disable federation of all user content and informationCheck by default no less, and maybe more but you get the idea, of the user need.
So as you can see @crazycells can see some user information already on mastodon, I think by default from a user privacy point of view and all that jazz it should not be assumed and set to default no. It only takes one user to complain!
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@omega correct, right now federation is enabled for the following categories:
- NodeBB Development
- NodeBB Development > ActivityPub
- Testing Ground
Posts in all other categories will not automatically federate due to privilege settings here. I limited it to those three categories specifically for testing purposes.
From a user privacy standpoint, it makes sense that they would want to have the option to disable federation of their content. Prior to general release (or even alpha/beta), I would be looking to add these toggles in.
From a user growth and interaction standpoint it'd be great to default-force-enable federation for everybody, but I think that frankly would come as a surprise to a great many people
Note that "Technical Support" is not federated, which is why other accounts when looking you up will not see your posts here.
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@omega well, @julian previously mentioned that only publicly available posts can be federated... Additionally, only federation-enabled categories can be federated-out... So, I do not think anyone on these categories would be upset if their contents are federated out, since it is already publicly accessible and users are aware that it is a federation-enabled section...
However, my concern would be the opposite of this, federated-in contents... These are basically unmoderated content from other servers... well... while each server likely to have its own moderation, these posts are not moderated by us, so federated-in contents could pose problems if someone is posting something that can be considered legal in one country but illegal in another... Unfortunately we are not living in a completely free world, and not all countries tolerate free speech equally.
so, it might be important for us to distance ourselves from those posts/profile by displaying a disclaimer indicating that these posts are from other servers?
mastodon social shows my replies (which were already publicly visible anyways, so I am not concerned about those), but for the posts, since I have not created any topic on this forum yet, it does not show anything and there is link to the original profile.
Perhaps, it would be beneficial to have these disclaimers on the forum, making it clear that these posts do not belong to our forum and are hosted on other servers... This way, I am hoping we can avoid any potential legal issues lol
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@julian just to clarify, my comment is also related to this post and concerns how posts from other servers appear on the NodeBB forum...
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@crazycells said in Posting in Activity pub:
However, my concern would be the opposite of this, federated-in contents... These are basically unmoderated content from other servers... well... while each server likely to have its own moderation, these posts are not moderated by us, so federated-in contents could pose problems if someone is posting something that can be considered legal in one country but illegal in another... Unfortunately we are not living in a completely free world, and not all countries tolerate free speech equally.
Correct, this is a very nuanced issue, and one that @[email protected] (who I am mentioning but who will not see this as this post is not federated out) will help us navigate.
The issue of user consent for federating out can be handwaved away by saying that "if you posts are visible to the public web, then federating it out is the same", but you can also make arguments that despite that distinction, they are still different.
As for content coming in to NodeBB, the bare minimum would be that we would pre-load a list of servers where federation is blocked. I'd want to have flexible tooling to allow admins to decide whether to allow specific instances, or to deny specific instances.
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@crazycells said in Posting in Activity pub:
@omega well, @julian previously mentioned that only publicly available posts can be federated... Additionally, only federation-enabled categories can be federated-out... So, I do not think anyone on these categories would be upset if their contents are federated out, since it is already publicly accessible and users are aware that it is a federation-enabled section...
However, my concern would be the opposite of this, federated-in contents... These are basically unmoderated content from other servers... well... while each server likely to have its own moderation, these posts are not moderated by us, so federated-in contents could pose problems if someone is posting something that can be considered legal in one country but illegal in another... Unfortunately we are not living in a completely free world, and not all countries tolerate free speech equally.
so, it might be important for us to distance ourselves from those posts/profile by displaying a disclaimer indicating that these posts are from other servers?
mastodon social shows my replies (which were already publicly visible anyways, so I am not concerned about those), but for the posts, since I have not created any topic on this forum yet, it does not show anything and there is link to the original profile.
Perhaps, it would be beneficial to have these disclaimers on the forum, making it clear that these posts do not belong to our forum and are hosted on other servers... This way, I am hoping we can avoid any potential legal issues lol
Hi @julian , will there be a "post queue" for activity pub posts ?
How will that work (if it has been decided yet)? I know you mentioned before about whitelisted and blacklisted servers... but I was asking about the posts themselves...
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@crazycells no, remote posts will not apply to the post queue.
The reasoning is two-fold:
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If you had to manually approve remote posts, you'd literally be inundated with them. The torrent would absolutely overwhelm small sites if they have even one user following remote content.
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Stuff in uncategorized is meant to be temporary unless they've been interacted with by a local user. If offensive content appears, they can be reported and handled, but it will also disappear from the local database at some point too (I am thinking maybe 30 days, but configurable by admin)
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@julian said in Posting in Activity pub:
@crazycells no, remote posts will not apply to the post queue.
The reasoning is two-fold:
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If you had to manually approve remote posts, you'd literally be inundated with them. The torrent would absolutely overwhelm small sites if they have even one user following remote content.
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Stuff in uncategorized is meant to be temporary unless they've been interacted with by a local user. If offensive content appears, they can be reported and handled, but it will also disappear from the local database at some point too (I am thinking maybe 30 days, but configurable by admin)
thanks. so, if we want to keep the post in the forum as a topic, we should move it from the "uncategorized" to the forum's own categories, right?
what if an improper post appears? can we hide or delete them?
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@crazycells yes, just like normal topics.
