Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.

caesar

@julian Here's the one I saw today: https://indieweb.social/@[email protected]/113101718634936122

However, I now see that the broken HTML appears in the original post on this forum, so it's not a federation problem. Apologies for the 'false alarm' on that aspect. I've definitely seen broken formatting before, but haven't clicked through to check where the issue was. I'll keep an eye out for it again.

That said, my point was mainly about the difficulty of actually working out how to interact with posts from a different instance (especially one running different software), rather than about the actual content of the federated messages.

omega

@caesar Yep that's it in a nutshell, nailed it, when it hits the "it just works" moment, this affords intuitive mass adoption

Getting to that point is filled with blood sweat and tears.

eeeee

Good points, and want to add, as credit to @julian , what he's building is complex.
Not many developers could do it.

julian

@caesar okay, how about the permalink issue? Can you show me the link you tried to paste into Mastodon? That definitely should work. That's a fairly standard flow (which is already janky, and can be improved)

caesar

@julian it was this one: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/7
It's a Discourse post (and thus problem) rather than a NodeBB one, but it illustrates the point of the general jankiness of inter-platform interaction on the fediverse: if I copy the permalink of your post above into my Mastodon instance, it finds it and I can reply, but if I copy the permalink of a Discourse post from the same thread, it doesn't work.

caesar

@eeeee Absolutely, and @julian has my deepest respect for that. Like I mentioned, the UI for inter-platform interactions is definitely a really tricky problem to solve in an intuitive way, and I don't think any Fediverse platform has managed it yet. (I'm very interested in this because I'm starting to consider similar issues as they relate to the Fediverse implementation in Forgejo.)

caesar

@julian sorry to multi-post but I forgot to say: although I can find your post from my Mastodon account and reply to it, I still haven't worked out how I would do the reverse from here. In fact I'm not sure if I can follow a Mastodon account (or perhaps more usefully, a Discourse or Lemmy topic or even a topic or account on a different NodeBB instance) from a NodeBB account at all, is that possible yet?

eeeee

@caesar the Discourse link you posted raises another issue.
Its a similar thread to this one, but it has additional posters, and any edits made in my posts arent reflected.
So these conversations arent fully federated when there are some posts in that thread missing from this one.
Out of interest @Omega, did you start your post on Discourse or on this site?

eeeee

As an example as the disconnect between the thread on Nodebb and Discourse, @[email protected] 's post is missing from nodebb sites thread.

And conversley some of Ceasars posts are in this thread but not that one.
Isnt the goal to duplicate all posts in all places so they stay in sync?

Caesar

@eeeee The lack of complete federation is another very good (and very hard to solve) point that makes federation less-than-intuitive. From my Mastodon instance the situation is worse, none of @bumblefudge 's posts nor any others from SocialHub appear in the thread. (See https://indieweb.social/@julian@community.nodebb.org/112972609579702339)

Caesar

I suspect most of the federation problems mentioned in the last few posts are the "fault" of Discourse – BrowserPub fails to find anything at https://browser.pub/https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem/4462/4 – but in the end the user doesn't care whose fault it is when something doesn't work, they just think federation is confusing and broken.

julian

@[email protected] the sync issue from Discourse is a little different... That's achieved via a category syncing mechanism that is unique to Discourse and NodeBB, right now that's broken and I have to wait until @[email protected] comes back to address it.

Same with the links in Discourse being unsearchable. They'll have to fix that.

julian

@[email protected] you can load remote content from the fediverse via NodeBB, just enter the permalink into the search bar.

For users, enter the handle in the users page search bar.

julian

@caesar @caesar@indieweb.social I've manually pulled in @[email protected] and @[email protected]'s posts now.

omega

@eeeee I am native posting only

omega

Going where no fediverse topic has gone before... not!

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-string-theory-2699363

String theory is a mathematical theory that tries to explain certain phenomena which is not currently explainable under the standard model of quantum physics.

30 words or less people!

eeeee

Omega, From your descriptive posts I thought you were a writer, but now a Physicist!
Many talents

omega

@eeeee I always get a Schrödinger's cat vibe off these fediverse topics am I the only one?

omega

Personally I think the word Federated is being used as if it was the word disseminated, which to me is more descriptively apt for common understanding.

“your post is disseminated across multiple platforms at once… across the fediverse… and you are like a sun, each post a ray of light that eventually reaches planets... soon disparate planetary religions spring up worshipping your name spanning light years across many galaxies”

Maybe not the last bit

Federated as it is used rather than it’s definition, seems more like a conflation shorthand of federation and dissemination into a single word placeholder, this might be my very personally arcane issue.

omega

Here is an edited version of the wiki entry for the fediverse:

The fediverse is a collection of social networks that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network.