I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They're one of our earliest v4 testers, since they've agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!
(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I'm taking the opportunities as they come!)
During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben (bean@community.openbeta.io and also bean@uvix.cc)... stuff I'm sure you've come across:
- Fragmented nature of conversations
- The idea of an instance
- Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model
... and wouldn't you know it, it's really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn't exactly new to him.
Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it's hard to step back and explain to ~~mere mortals~~ ~~laymen~~ non-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.
All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with andypiper@macaw.social on documentation!
That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io/ :)
Finally the topic I’ve been waiting for.
Honestly.
Tbh. I have zoned out because of this and other non node related things.
I haven’t had time to distill APub and often refer back to my own past concepts that seemed to resemble activitypub to get my noodle around it.
So while I kinda get it I haven’t actually gotten into it.
Discourse has had it for sometime too but APub is disorientating, bottom line it’s like where do I start and why do I even start? What is or where is the problem it has solved? (As a user or site admin/owner)
If you can’t explain it in 20/30 words it will never gain mass appeal or adoption, if you can’t value it, it will remain invisible to the potential end user.
Even the responses (good contributions) but to my problem still can’t encapsulate it enough to simply answer the question, simply.
I had in early reaction to nascent implantation suggested, some UI changes to help with my own gut reaction to the interplay on community, but as time goes on I found the activity of activity pub really staring and amplify harmonies (theme) weak points to make skimming posts less appealing and of course life, and the times we live in too, getting in the way - Ah yea life that world outside but also the inner life too, perhaps the greater undiscovered country.
So let me see. How can it or what can Activity pub nested in NodeBB do to enable or enhance that journey?
Or are you actually (is NodeBB) on the right journey?