The "Forum as a Fediverse Client" Experiment

[splatsune@neurario.com]

If you've noticed my main site lately, you've probably seen that my blog is now... a forum. For just me.

Silly, right?

Well, I've been excited and following along on NodeBB's ActivityPub integration, and now that it's reached an alpha state, I've deployed it here and on The General Chat. Over on the latter, it exists as a closed-registration forum, that just happens to also publish to the Fediverse.

Over here, I intend to use it a bit differently.

Right now, there are four different forum categories:

• The Blog: Exactly what it says on the tin, this is where my blog posts will go.
• Featured Discussions: Every now and then when I run into some important discussions that I want to share, I'll show them here.
• General Discussion: This is where most of my general fediverse communication will happen - the stuff that actually means something to me, at least. The 'just posting into the aether' posts will probably be kept off here, unless they turn into something at least!
• Curated Feeds: This is more for me than anything else. NodeBB (in theory, I haven't managed to see it work yet) lets me 'follow' groups from elsewhere on the fediverse, so that their posts appear in the category they're followed from. I can see myself using this to, as you might expect, build a list of content feeds from other places, and therefore participate and follow in discussions.

I've also added a 'homepage', so that the main page of the forum shows my more recent blog posts, as well as a feed of what I'm posting into the fediverse. Sooner or later, I'll add either a second page or a description to my profile on here which links to all the places you can find me - a source of truth for all the places I have 'official' accounts.

I'm sure this setup will evolve more as I settle in to this new place, and as NodeBB's ActivityPub development continues. I'm interested to hear your thoughts!

(If you're reading this on my site and wish to comment, I believe you can copy the topic link, or the little '#1' link in the corner, and post that into the search bar of your fediverse client. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!)

[splatsune@neurario.com]

Here's a follow-up post on the experiment so far. I've enjoyed the novelty of viewing the fediverse as forum threads, especially when some of those threads get moving:

And following folks that my instance doesn't know about yet has been... simple enough (/user/<user id>)...

But as of yet I haven't figured out a way to view remote posts here. On Mastodon (and similar places), copy-pasting the link to the post into your search bar will show it on your client. I can't do that with the search bar here, and while looking at a post's ID in a thread shows it as something like (for example) https://neurario.com/post/https://blahaj.zone/notes/9x2vcv8fkorq012b, and clicking that link will bring me to the correct post, NodeBB at the moment doesn't seem to know what to do if I decide to fetch a post it doesn't know about. It's entirely possible that it can be done in a way that I haven't found yet, but it's also possible that that functionality simply hasn't been built in yet - this is an alpha build, after all.

It's also important to know that as is, CWs do not function here- rather, are not handled at all. The content underneath is simply posted as is. To be fair to NodeBB here, the functionality for something like spoilers is not built into the software - it is a third-party plugin you can install. Similarly, if I try to hide something in a 'spoiler tag' here, the tags are simply ignored and posted to the fediverse with everything as is. That's fine, if I was not using it as I was.

The final thing which is proving troublesome is the advertised functionality of 'syndicating' certain fediverse actors to forum categories. The intent of the feature is to pull posts from group actors like Lemmy communities, other NodeBB forum categories, Guppe groups, etc, into specific parts of a forum. And... at least on this instance, I have not managed to get it working. It appears to try to send the 'follow' activity to the other instance, but it fails in some way, and because the error is represented as [Object object] (I assume a JSON response), I can't tell why it's failing. I'll try updating to the latest build over the weekend and see if that does anything to help.

Despite these current shortcomings, I am enjoying the experience. I still check in on my Mastodon now and then to try and keep up on things here and there.

I did (kind of) attempt to get a forum going for The General Chat, but it might just be that we've all drifted too far apart now. Or I need to try harder. Idk.