@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?
caesar
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Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem. -
Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.@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.)
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Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.@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. -
Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.@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.
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Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.Honestly I think that if interoperability between different types of federated platforms Just Worked people would "understand" it more intuitively, because they'd see it in action instead of it having to be explained to them as an abstract concept.
I'm a fairly tech-savvy user, and I perfectly understand what federation is and how it works on a technical level, but even I find the UI aspects often confusing or downright impossible to figure out.
For example, I saw this thread from my Mastodon client because I followed the ActivityPub topic on this forum from my Mastodon account. In my Mastodon client the posts appear as boosts, but mostly with broken HTML formatting. I clicked through to this forum to read the thread properly. I then wanted to "like" / +1 a post, so I copied the permalink into my Mastodon client like I would for a post on a different Mastodon instance, but it couldn't find anything. In the end I had to log into my local account on this forum instead.Don't get me wrong, the UI problems are very difficult to get right. But I think they're more important than documentation. When it Just Works, people will grok it and documentation/explanation won't be needed.