julian

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (today) on 4 September 2025.

Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg

This month's meeting has no set agenda. Discussions will continue re: FEP 7888/f228 adoption and ongoing FEP drafts.

Today we released v4.5.0 of NodeBB, which contains a multitude of fixes, refactors, and several new AP-related features.

Dependency Updates :gear:

• connect-multiparty was replaced with multer for multi-part request body handling
• ioredis was replaced with node-redis as the former was deprecated with the latter being the recommended replacement

Chat and notification updates :left_speech_bubble:

• Administrators are now able to toggle the chat join and leave messages in chat rooms
• Clicking "mark all read" on the notification page now marks only those matching the filter, read

Analytics updates :chart:

• Page requests from ActivityPub now correctly increment the unique visitors metric

ActivityPub :globe_with_meridians:

• Top-level posts (OP) federating out now contain a summary of roughly the first 500 characters, instead of sending the entire post content
• Two-way Relay support (Litepub-style)
• Auto-categorization logic for incoming post content from remote sources
• Ability to add remote categories to the forum index

Just an idle thought... A common UX is users copying the URL in the address bar and pasting it into their fediverse app to load it in their app.

Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic (/topic/12345) and paste it into something like Mastodon, you'll get nothing because it is an ordered collection and it doesn't know how to handle it.

But... what if I passed in a preview property a la evan@cosocial.ca's b2b8 and it contained a Note? Maybe a note with a different id? Maybe with a name?

Waiting for trwnh@mastodon.social to tell me this is a terrible idea.

I'm away from my desk for the next few days and so I'll likely be posting more open ended discussion questions.

Recently I've been thinking more about the decline of forums of yesteryear and how hosting a forum has always been rather niche.

That got me thinking about how one of Reddit's "killer features" was that just anybody could create a subreddit. The same could be said about Facebook groups as well.

You don't get that with forums, only the admin can create categories/forums, and by extension that usually limited the rise of general interest boards, and more towards niche topic-focused boards. It also meant that basically every board had a "general discussion" board or "random" board.

Would there be interest in NodeBB supporting something like this... Basically, the ability for anyone to set up a category and instantly moderate it, and build your own sub community inside a community? Does this ruin the magic of forums?

Keep up the good memeing though...

Agenda preparation for the April ForumWG meeting can be found at this public link (anyone can make comments for review.)

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held on 7 August 2025.

We will be discussing:

• FEP 7888/f228 adoption update
• Context Inheritance
• Context Ownership
• Merging of Contexts (aka "cross-posting")

As I write this, I'm sitting on an airplane flying over the Canadian prairies on my way home from Vancouver, BC.

What an amazing group of individuals, who took the time out of their extraordinarily busy lives to see, hear, and learn about the fediverse! The connections made and ideas discussed were so important, and you could feel the energy in the air.

You'd think after a solid six hours a day in a lecture hall would be enough, but at every opportunity in between, there were lively discussions about ActivityPub and the fediverse. It turns out when you get all of us in a group together we can talk and continue to talk about the open social web for ages.

I now have a to-do list about a kilometer long, they all need to get done ASAP!

Thank you to reiver@mastodon.social for organizing this conference, all of those who helped out and participated, and all those who attended.

From now on, whenever someone points a camera to me, I'll picture jaz@toot.wales saying "say FEEEEEEDIVERSE".

Let's get this party started!

Day 1 of FediCon

An in-person conference centered around the fediverse is happening this Friday and Saturday at UBC Robson Square in Vancouver, BC.

Put on by reiver@mastodon.social, it is bringing together a number of big names including Evan Prodromou (of AP fame), Dan Supernault (Pixelfed creator), and more!

> 🎉 FediCon is in 1 day! > >If you already have a FediCon ticket, you should receive this reminder e-mail message. > >See you there! > >... > >🌐 FediCon >📍 Vancouver (Canada) >🗓️ August 1-2 >ℹ️ https://fedicon.ca/ >🎟️ https://lu.ma/p4bbb941 > >🥳 https://lu.ma/kowist5x >🥳 https://lu.ma/reg4appv

I'll be on stage speaking about some of ActivityPub's "hard problems", and what people are doing to fix them. It's a rehash and expansion of a talk I gave at FOSDEM this past February.

Are there threadiverse related problems? I'd imagine so. Would love to include them in my presentation.

I've been toying with the idea of using OAuth2/OpenID and the C2S API to have a service act on behalf of another instance (e.g. act on Lemmy, post as Mastodon account)

But now I'm wondering whether that kind of complexity is needed... one could theoretically register a public key to the instance it is acting on behalf of, and simply sign activities using the ID of the other server... Second server would need only update the actor with the new public key for verification purposes...

Apologies again for cancelling the WG meeting again, as I have a conflict with another meeting held at the same time.

We'll reconvene in August!

We just released version 4.1.0 of NodeBB. Here are the latest features you can now take advantage of!

As an aside, for the first time in a long while, both @baris and I are working on the same codebase again. Up until version 4 was released, I'd been working on the activitypub branch and periodically merging in the latest changes from develop. It's nice to be home! :house_with_garden:

Improved federation of Group actors :left_speech_bubble:

We've improved the activity synchronization for followed group actors. Local updates/likes/etc. are now federated outward by the category in addition to those from remote users. Thanks to @rimu@piefed.social and @freamon who worked with me on debugging this one.

Mentions and Emoji now federating out in source.content :wave:

Emoji and mentions have been sent out to followers since v4, but that wasn't reflected in the raw markdown content that we also send along. That has been remediated now, and this change improves nodebb-to-nodebb federation.

Video object type now parseable :tv:

NodeBB is now able to ingest Peertube Video objects, and render then in a topic just like other pieces of content. Thanks @deadsuperhero@forum.wedistribute.org for prodding me to get this sorted out!