supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
on 17 Dec 2023 01:18
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This is really cool, I wonder if it can have integration with the “threadiverse” such as with lemmy or kbin?
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 04:59
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Eventually I imagine there will be adaptors for all the various types of post throughout the fediverse. I wonder if the differences will become largely superficial, with every activitypub system able to read all the others. It’s just a matter of maturing the ecosystem.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
on 17 Dec 2023 16:03
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Hopefully but that is a tough nut to crack especially if things weren’t designed to be that way originally.
I wonder how a strictly linear thread structure is possible to transpose into a branching structure like lemmy
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
on 17 Dec 2023 16:01
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Yeah that is a good point, at the very least lemmy could display a traditional thread but yeah I have no idea about discourse displaying a lemmy thread.
uthredii@programming.dev
on 17 Dec 2023 16:52
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We can already view mastodon threads that are linear inside Lemmy.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 05:31
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It's funny seeing how different a reaction people have to the same basic thing happening.
halm@leminal.space
on 17 Dec 2023 09:29
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The same technical thing, yes. The key difference really is whether or not a notoriously exploitative corporation is behind.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 17 Dec 2023 15:37
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Except that since federating is a technical action we can look at, and examine technically, we can all of course see that it gives Meta access to nothing that they couldn’t have scraped publicly.
Sure, if that’s your only concern — and disregarding that it’s a minority who would likely have the time, diligence and knowhow to actually confirm that you’re right — but Meta’s interest in directly leaked or scraped data is probably secondary to embrace-extend-extinguish alternatives to their services. Discourse doesn’t exactly have that motive.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 11:30
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Discourse is 100% open source. Meta is basically 0% open source. Big, big difference.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 12:39
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You are clearly just on the hate train that's currently gripping these threads and don't know much about Meta. They contribute a great deal to open source. Of particular note in the past year or so are the Llama large language models, which essentially did for large language models what StabilityAI did for generative art - they broke the dominance of big closed-source companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to get the open-source LLM movement rolling.
It remains to be seen whether they'll play nicely with ActivityPub or not, but it is far from a foregone conclusion.
It’s not a hate train, it’s being cautious. And do you really think that Meta is open sourcing because of their passion for FOSS and standing by those values? They’ve taken an internal framework they’ve build, open source it so that they can advertise how open and great they are on the page you linked, and after it gains traction (which it will, since it’s used by Meta it must be good /s) they can reduce their own internal efforts to a minimum, since the community will contribute. Open source may be a passion for the developers of Meta, but the company Meta does not give a single flying fuck about FOSS or the Fediverse.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 17 Dec 2023 15:36
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Like half of the internet (including lemmy’s clients and server applications) run on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains.
The company obviously cares about making money, as all companies do, but the reality of our world is that most good usable software is written by for-profit corporations, that’s not an argument against using it, that’s an argument to develop other sources for funding software development.
wervenyt@lemm.ee
on 17 Dec 2023 16:38
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Meta built and maintains a few web frameworks. That’s great. They also build and maintain a propaganda network that’s happy to work in accord with abusive governments, for profit. Which of these is a greater moral weight? I’m not gonna overlook the latter because react is comfy.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 17:00
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They also build and maintain a propaganda network that’s happy to work in accord with abusive governments
The irony of this being said on a Lemmy instance is amusing. Are you aware of the political leanings of the Lemmy devs and of some of the larger Lemmy instances' original communities of users? The Fediverse as a whole is managing to diversify away from that, but it just goes to show how good things can come from bad actors.
I am! and the difference is that lemmy doesn’t seem designed to convert people to Marxist-Leninism, while Facebook seems designed to agitate and suppress meaningful discourse while simultaneously entrenching consumerism even more than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is one of those Roman Guys, you know, them, but I don’t think that the propaganda I referred to was in service of convincing everyone that Julius Caesar was rad. Mostly, these things are larger than their founders. And Facebook is still a propaganda network designed to convince people that if they leave, they’ll lose touch with all their friends.
Meta has React, RocksDB and pytorch, and a few other “niche” frameworks and tools. “Half of the internet […] run[ning] on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains” is a big, big exaggeration. Also maintainance is done by the OSS community for big parts, and I’m really curious what open source infrastructure Meta is running.
I’m not saying Meta has no relevance in OSS, but I can hardly think of an open source org that does open source purely for its own benefit. React helps them shape the web in the way Meta wants it, their ML stuff is important for their own internal needs (ads, BI, and the whole social networking, etc.), their AR/VR/XR contributions are for the Quest, and KI/LLM since they need it themselves instead of relying/partnering with OpenAI. Meta (the company) absolutely does not stand by the principles of open source, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 16:57
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The fact that FlyingSquid declared Meta to be "0% open source" when in fact Meta has been a major contributor to open source suggests that they're simply saying whatever bad things they can think of saying about Meta, not bothering to ground those things in any real facts. That's presumably because right now everyone is dumping on Meta and so comments that say bad things about Meta get upvoted without being checked (and comments that says anything as tepid as "maybe Meta is not completely awful" garners downvotes and homophobic attacks, ask me how I know). That's the hate train I'm talking about.
The motivation of why Meta does what it does doesn't change what they're doing. It's entirely possible for a big giant evil corporation to see benefit in playing nice with an open source ecosystem. My position all along has been to wait and see what they're going to do before instantly leaping to fragment the Fediverse against them.
KevonLooney@lemm.ee
on 17 Dec 2023 17:10
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Their motivation is more important than what they’re doing. But right now their motivation is to compete with Twitter. The Fediverse is no threat to them because it’s tiny.
There’s your playing nice. They want to feed on ActivityPub data, while only contributing in a per-user opt-in selection. It’s a joke, and both their motivation and what they are doing is absolutely fucked. It’s another cog in their data ingestion machine that they can keep fucking around with, again.
I really can not comprehend why anyone would give this advance of trust to Meta, when all signs are showing you to bail.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 18 Dec 2023 17:56
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So the big fear that existing Fediverse communities will be overrun with Threads content is moot? That seems to be the main concern people have.
I don't see what the problem with them reading ActivityPub data is. That's what it's for. These communities are not private and there was never any need for Threads to integrate ActivityPub for them to "ingest" the content from them.
The problem is not them reading data, but that Threads will take Fediverse content, and display it on Threads. In the opposite direction, Fediverse will only see the select few user content that do actually opt-in, and let’s be honest here, most users won’t know what the Fediverse is, except for again the few people that are on both platforms.
This is absolutely not “playing nice” as you’ve put it before, and purely parasitic and, again, purely a greed decision by Meta.
I don’t really know why you are shilling so hard trying to excuse absolutely unexcusable behavior.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 18 Dec 2023 21:22
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I'm not shilling. As I've said repeatedly, I don't like Meta. But I just don't see what problem this is. Sitting here on kbin.social, how does it affect me if someone over on Meta is seeing my posts and comments?
Before you talked about the Fediverse as a whole, now from a single user perspective.
IMO it affects the Fediverse as a whole by abusing it. The whole idea is an open network, where instances can federate with each other to bilaterally share information and create a seemingly single platform. This is not the case with the planned Threads integration, because they explicitly plan to feed on the content, but hiding sharing their own content behind an (for most of their userbase) obscure opt-in.
From a single user perspective it doesn’t affect you directly. But it affects the platform you are part of with malicious intent.
I am not against Threads joining the Fediverse, and I do actually think it would be great for the growth of the Fediverse if actual big players join, and if it brings content that I personally do not like to see, I can use the tools available (e.g. blocking user/communities/instances) to hide it. But only if they plan on joining as a “regular instance” like any other - but Meta does not intent doing so, since they have chosen the opt-in with obvious intent of simply gaining additional content on their walled platform for their own gain.
FaceDeer@kbin.social
on 19 Dec 2023 02:37
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The Fediverse is made up of individual users. If Threads isn't broadcasting its content out to other instances, how does it affect anyone out there on those other instances? They'll never see a thing. I used a single example user (myself) simply to illustrate that.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 17 Dec 2023 15:33
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There’s literally no difference from a Lemmy user’s perspective. It does not matter to us whether someone browses Lemmy from Sync (a closed source Lemmy app) or an open source one.
Anyone have an example of how browsing/commenting works? Can we follow a forum’s section using lemmy or mastodon accounts? How do we comment on a discourse thread with mastodon or lemmy?
BlenderArtists forum uses discourse so that would be cool to browse/use with lemmy
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 04:56
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Makes sense, it was already open source, just attaching to the activitypub protocol is a straightforward move.
It’s everywhere too. Blogs, webcomics, special interest forums, and they will all potentially become new fediverse instances virtually by default. It’s pointing to a future where people join the fediverse without knowing what it is or seeking it out. They just want to join a forum to discuss their interests.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 05:08
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It could be an issue if the admin isn’t prepared for it. One of the good things about it is that the posts get cached wherever they’re accessed so it may actually reduce server load for a popular post.
I guess if it is an issue the admins could always disable activitypub.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 12:35
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If they get cached then do edits never propagate to other servers?
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 14:57
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No, edits propagate, they just get sent as updates, and it happens pretty quick I think.
But posts are about 1/100th of the traffic in forums in general, most people are just lurking. That’s the traffic that slows down servers.
ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 09:11
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This could be the new “redditor answers my question” place for me 🤯🎉
Forum users tend to prefer long-lasting discussions, which is not the case on Lemmy/Reddit, where threads are forgotten after a few days.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 17 Dec 2023 15:34
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Yeah that’s exactly what sucks about them.
When you open up the front page, you’re not shown what is the most interesting and recent topics, you’re shown 12 year old thread that xxedgelord69 dug up and added a fuckin’ poop emoji.
halm@leminal.space
on 18 Dec 2023 10:31
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I will say that I find good advice on tech subreddits now and then, as good as or better than, say, support forums. That’s off the divisive and rapid-change subjects that mostly characterise Reddit and Lemmy, of course.
stackPeek@lemmy.world
on 26 Dec 2023 13:39
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Heck–it was designed to be like that, even Reddit archivesa thread after 6 months right?
Nutteman@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 15:27
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Forums are where you can still find answers to the veeeerrrryyyyy niche questions you may have on just about anything. They have saved my ass so many times when trying to get things working on my pc or with my car.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 17 Dec 2023 15:36
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And you can’t find niche answers on forums like Lemmy?
Nutteman@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 21:38
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Not always, no. And often the question I have has already been answered on those forums. So no need to even post to lemmy. Have you never had to troubleshoot something before or something?
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 17 Dec 2023 21:59
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Not always, no.
And you can “always” find them on forums?
And often the question I have has already been answered on those forums.
I’d say the same goes for a certain very popular Lemmy-like message board. Way moreso than any forum.
Have you never had to troubleshoot something before or something?
Oh good, we’ve reached the personal insults phase of the discussion, that was fast.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 17 Dec 2023 15:32
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eVeRYOnE defederate immediately! It will flood our community with new users and be awful!
AustralianSimon@lemmy.world
on 18 Dec 2023 10:57
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Spicy
stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi
on 17 Dec 2023 15:52
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That’s great! It’s really annoying for me how I have to make an account on every single discourse forum, and every time I get the welcome mail and the first comment badge, and so on. Also, the emails from all of the forums are annoying. This seems to fix all of that.
uthredii@programming.dev
on 17 Dec 2023 16:57
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Discourse and Lemmy are both based around topics/communities so hopefully there will be better federation here. E.g. being able to follow a discourse topic from lemmy would be really cool.
Hopefully they have done this in a way where Lemmy can federate with then easily.
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 17:50
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What do you get when you take a traditional forum, add vote based sorting so that the best post and comments (in theory) rise to the top to avoiding the issue of thread bumping, use a nested comment structure so that individual conversations in each thread can be easily followed, and allow anyone to make a subforum as they please?
You get reddit. (or now, Lemmy) The only thing missing in Lemmy is topic tags, which I think is a nice to have, but by no means necessary.
There is a reason why very few people uses forums and most of conversation nowadays takes place on social media, while reddit and Discord has but all but replaced them. So, replacing Discourse/Zenforo as the software to use for independent Internet forums should be the aim for Lemmy to significantly grow.
Strangely, Discourse’s federation model seemed to be based on Mastodon compatibility instead of Lemmy-like Groups, which I think is a mistake.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world
on 18 Dec 2023 18:05
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I think you’re missing the point of a forum like discourse, which is most definitely not a classic forum.
In no way is it similar to lemmy or Reddit when it comes to functionality or the problem space that it solves for. It’s essentially stackoverflow, for niche communities, do you really think you could replace the utility of stackoverflow with… Reddit?
It’s specifically tailored to q&A, knowledge sharing/archiving, and as a living knowledge base. It does an excellent job of that, with copious features built specifically to enable and support that purpose. Which both lemmy and Reddit lack, they aren’t even in the same problem space.
The platforms that actually utilize discourse effectively are some of the best to work on. Similar communities on social media platforms don’t have anywhere near the level of quality, engagement, knowledge, or problem solving. Even simple features that encourage engagement in months or years old threads are massive boon.
It really is not much of a step to take your logic and replace lemmy or Reddit with Discord as a Q&A support and knowledge base platform. Which we all know is a terrible idea, and largely leads to a loss of knowledge and destroys discoverability.
Overall I get the feeling that you may not have experienced what makes that platform powerful? Which understandably can lead to thoughts that it’s “just another forum”, and that it is supplementable with a social media platform (which in the reality of it is laughably bad).
Check out forum.babylonjs.com for example. The framework is an absolute pain in the ass to onboard too but because their forum is just so damn good, it was a breeze compared to others.
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world
on 18 Dec 2023 19:23
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Let me address some of your points:
a forum like discourse, which is most definitely not a classic forum.
Linear post structure, sorting based on latest response, so it is a traditional in vein of old BBS/phpBB systems.
Do you really think you could replace the utility of stackoverflow with… Reddit?
Upvote based sorting and nested comment structure means StackExchange/Overflow is closer to reddit than it is Discourse.
It really is not much of a step to take your logic and replace lemmy or Reddit with Discord as a Q&A support and knowledge base platform.
Reddit, Lemmy, and Discourse are all public forums, Discord is a chatroom.
Even simple features that encourage engagement in months or years old threads are massive boon.
Thread necromancy for month/year old dead threads has always been considered offenses to almost every single forum, which is why most forums lock posts after a month or so. It’s not a feature, it’s a fundamental flaw with the sorting.
with copious features built specifically to enable and support that purpose. Which both lemmy and Reddit lack
I’m genuinely curious, what are some of those features? I can’t think of any significant one, outside of tags.
Forums are ultimately shaped by people, so I would say these forum succeeded in spite of the software instead of because of the software.
threaded - newest
This is really cool, I wonder if it can have integration with the “threadiverse” such as with lemmy or kbin?
Eventually I imagine there will be adaptors for all the various types of post throughout the fediverse. I wonder if the differences will become largely superficial, with every activitypub system able to read all the others. It’s just a matter of maturing the ecosystem.
Hopefully but that is a tough nut to crack especially if things weren’t designed to be that way originally.
I wonder how a strictly linear thread structure is possible to transpose into a branching structure like lemmy
Yeah that is a good point, at the very least lemmy could display a traditional thread but yeah I have no idea about discourse displaying a lemmy thread.
We can already view mastodon threads that are linear inside Lemmy.
.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software)
Ah so unrelated to Facebook. Good
It's funny seeing how different a reaction people have to the same basic thing happening.
The same technical thing, yes. The key difference really is whether or not a notoriously exploitative corporation is behind.
Except that since federating is a technical action we can look at, and examine technically, we can all of course see that it gives Meta access to nothing that they couldn’t have scraped publicly.
Sure, if that’s your only concern — and disregarding that it’s a minority who would likely have the time, diligence and knowhow to actually confirm that you’re right — but Meta’s interest in directly leaked or scraped data is probably secondary to embrace-extend-extinguish alternatives to their services. Discourse doesn’t exactly have that motive.
Discourse is 100% open source. Meta is basically 0% open source. Big, big difference.
You are clearly just on the hate train that's currently gripping these threads and don't know much about Meta. They contribute a great deal to open source. Of particular note in the past year or so are the Llama large language models, which essentially did for large language models what StabilityAI did for generative art - they broke the dominance of big closed-source companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to get the open-source LLM movement rolling.
It remains to be seen whether they'll play nicely with ActivityPub or not, but it is far from a foregone conclusion.
It’s not a hate train, it’s being cautious. And do you really think that Meta is open sourcing because of their passion for FOSS and standing by those values? They’ve taken an internal framework they’ve build, open source it so that they can advertise how open and great they are on the page you linked, and after it gains traction (which it will, since it’s used by Meta it must be good /s) they can reduce their own internal efforts to a minimum, since the community will contribute. Open source may be a passion for the developers of Meta, but the company Meta does not give a single flying fuck about FOSS or the Fediverse.
Like half of the internet (including lemmy’s clients and server applications) run on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains.
The company obviously cares about making money, as all companies do, but the reality of our world is that most good usable software is written by for-profit corporations, that’s not an argument against using it, that’s an argument to develop other sources for funding software development.
Meta built and maintains a few web frameworks. That’s great. They also build and maintain a propaganda network that’s happy to work in accord with abusive governments, for profit. Which of these is a greater moral weight? I’m not gonna overlook the latter because react is comfy.
The irony of this being said on a Lemmy instance is amusing. Are you aware of the political leanings of the Lemmy devs and of some of the larger Lemmy instances' original communities of users? The Fediverse as a whole is managing to diversify away from that, but it just goes to show how good things can come from bad actors.
I am! and the difference is that lemmy doesn’t seem designed to convert people to Marxist-Leninism, while Facebook seems designed to agitate and suppress meaningful discourse while simultaneously entrenching consumerism even more than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is one of those Roman Guys, you know, them, but I don’t think that the propaganda I referred to was in service of convincing everyone that Julius Caesar was rad. Mostly, these things are larger than their founders. And Facebook is still a propaganda network designed to convince people that if they leave, they’ll lose touch with all their friends.
Meta has React, RocksDB and pytorch, and a few other “niche” frameworks and tools. “Half of the internet […] run[ning] on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains” is a big, big exaggeration. Also maintainance is done by the OSS community for big parts, and I’m really curious what open source infrastructure Meta is running.
I’m not saying Meta has no relevance in OSS, but I can hardly think of an open source org that does open source purely for its own benefit. React helps them shape the web in the way Meta wants it, their ML stuff is important for their own internal needs (ads, BI, and the whole social networking, etc.), their AR/VR/XR contributions are for the Quest, and KI/LLM since they need it themselves instead of relying/partnering with OpenAI. Meta (the company) absolutely does not stand by the principles of open source, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it.
The fact that FlyingSquid declared Meta to be "0% open source" when in fact Meta has been a major contributor to open source suggests that they're simply saying whatever bad things they can think of saying about Meta, not bothering to ground those things in any real facts. That's presumably because right now everyone is dumping on Meta and so comments that say bad things about Meta get upvoted without being checked (and comments that says anything as tepid as "maybe Meta is not completely awful" garners downvotes and homophobic attacks, ask me how I know). That's the hate train I'm talking about.
The motivation of why Meta does what it does doesn't change what they're doing. It's entirely possible for a big giant evil corporation to see benefit in playing nice with an open source ecosystem. My position all along has been to wait and see what they're going to do before instantly leaping to fragment the Fediverse against them.
Their motivation is more important than what they’re doing. But right now their motivation is to compete with Twitter. The Fediverse is no threat to them because it’s tiny.
www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C051TLnud8U
There’s your playing nice. They want to feed on ActivityPub data, while only contributing in a per-user opt-in selection. It’s a joke, and both their motivation and what they are doing is absolutely fucked. It’s another cog in their data ingestion machine that they can keep fucking around with, again.
I really can not comprehend why anyone would give this advance of trust to Meta, when all signs are showing you to bail.
So the big fear that existing Fediverse communities will be overrun with Threads content is moot? That seems to be the main concern people have.
I don't see what the problem with them reading ActivityPub data is. That's what it's for. These communities are not private and there was never any need for Threads to integrate ActivityPub for them to "ingest" the content from them.
The problem is not them reading data, but that Threads will take Fediverse content, and display it on Threads. In the opposite direction, Fediverse will only see the select few user content that do actually opt-in, and let’s be honest here, most users won’t know what the Fediverse is, except for again the few people that are on both platforms. This is absolutely not “playing nice” as you’ve put it before, and purely parasitic and, again, purely a greed decision by Meta. I don’t really know why you are shilling so hard trying to excuse absolutely unexcusable behavior.
I'm not shilling. As I've said repeatedly, I don't like Meta. But I just don't see what problem this is. Sitting here on kbin.social, how does it affect me if someone over on Meta is seeing my posts and comments?
Before you talked about the Fediverse as a whole, now from a single user perspective.
IMO it affects the Fediverse as a whole by abusing it. The whole idea is an open network, where instances can federate with each other to bilaterally share information and create a seemingly single platform. This is not the case with the planned Threads integration, because they explicitly plan to feed on the content, but hiding sharing their own content behind an (for most of their userbase) obscure opt-in.
From a single user perspective it doesn’t affect you directly. But it affects the platform you are part of with malicious intent.
I am not against Threads joining the Fediverse, and I do actually think it would be great for the growth of the Fediverse if actual big players join, and if it brings content that I personally do not like to see, I can use the tools available (e.g. blocking user/communities/instances) to hide it. But only if they plan on joining as a “regular instance” like any other - but Meta does not intent doing so, since they have chosen the opt-in with obvious intent of simply gaining additional content on their walled platform for their own gain.
The Fediverse is made up of individual users. If Threads isn't broadcasting its content out to other instances, how does it affect anyone out there on those other instances? They'll never see a thing. I used a single example user (myself) simply to illustrate that.
There’s literally no difference from a Lemmy user’s perspective. It does not matter to us whether someone browses Lemmy from Sync (a closed source Lemmy app) or an open source one.
This is a nonsense distinction to make.
Anyone have an example of how browsing/commenting works? Can we follow a forum’s section using lemmy or mastodon accounts? How do we comment on a discourse thread with mastodon or lemmy?
BlenderArtists forum uses discourse so that would be cool to browse/use with lemmy
The person who made the actual announcement attached a video of exactly that: meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/…/117
Makes sense, it was already open source, just attaching to the activitypub protocol is a straightforward move.
It’s everywhere too. Blogs, webcomics, special interest forums, and they will all potentially become new fediverse instances virtually by default. It’s pointing to a future where people join the fediverse without knowing what it is or seeking it out. They just want to join a forum to discuss their interests.
.
It could be an issue if the admin isn’t prepared for it. One of the good things about it is that the posts get cached wherever they’re accessed so it may actually reduce server load for a popular post.
I guess if it is an issue the admins could always disable activitypub.
If they get cached then do edits never propagate to other servers?
No, edits propagate, they just get sent as updates, and it happens pretty quick I think.
But posts are about 1/100th of the traffic in forums in general, most people are just lurking. That’s the traffic that slows down servers.
This could be the new “redditor answers my question” place for me 🤯🎉
thats cool ngl
I guess it’s not a bad thing but I feel like “forums” should be left in 1999 where they belong and these platforms should just switch to Lemmy.
Forum users tend to prefer long-lasting discussions, which is not the case on Lemmy/Reddit, where threads are forgotten after a few days.
Yeah that’s exactly what sucks about them.
When you open up the front page, you’re not shown what is the most interesting and recent topics, you’re shown 12 year old thread that xxedgelord69 dug up and added a fuckin’ poop emoji.
I will say that I find good advice on tech subreddits now and then, as good as or better than, say, support forums. That’s off the divisive and rapid-change subjects that mostly characterise Reddit and Lemmy, of course.
Heck–it was designed to be like that, even Reddit archivesa thread after 6 months right?
Forums are where you can still find answers to the veeeerrrryyyyy niche questions you may have on just about anything. They have saved my ass so many times when trying to get things working on my pc or with my car.
And you can’t find niche answers on forums like Lemmy?
Not always, no. And often the question I have has already been answered on those forums. So no need to even post to lemmy. Have you never had to troubleshoot something before or something?
And you can “always” find them on forums?
I’d say the same goes for a certain very popular Lemmy-like message board. Way moreso than any forum.
Oh good, we’ve reached the personal insults phase of the discussion, that was fast.
eVeRYOnE defederate immediately! It will flood our community with new users and be awful!
Spicy
That’s great! It’s really annoying for me how I have to make an account on every single discourse forum, and every time I get the welcome mail and the first comment badge, and so on. Also, the emails from all of the forums are annoying. This seems to fix all of that.
Discourse and Lemmy are both based around topics/communities so hopefully there will be better federation here. E.g. being able to follow a discourse topic from lemmy would be really cool.
Hopefully they have done this in a way where Lemmy can federate with then easily.
What do you get when you take a traditional forum, add vote based sorting so that the best post and comments (in theory) rise to the top to avoiding the issue of thread bumping, use a nested comment structure so that individual conversations in each thread can be easily followed, and allow anyone to make a subforum as they please?
You get reddit. (or now, Lemmy) The only thing missing in Lemmy is topic tags, which I think is a nice to have, but by no means necessary.
There is a reason why very few people uses forums and most of conversation nowadays takes place on social media, while reddit and Discord has but all but replaced them. So, replacing Discourse/Zenforo as the software to use for independent Internet forums should be the aim for Lemmy to significantly grow.
Strangely, Discourse’s federation model seemed to be based on Mastodon compatibility instead of Lemmy-like Groups, which I think is a mistake.
I think you’re missing the point of a forum like discourse, which is most definitely not a classic forum.
In no way is it similar to lemmy or Reddit when it comes to functionality or the problem space that it solves for. It’s essentially stackoverflow, for niche communities, do you really think you could replace the utility of stackoverflow with… Reddit?
It’s specifically tailored to q&A, knowledge sharing/archiving, and as a living knowledge base. It does an excellent job of that, with copious features built specifically to enable and support that purpose. Which both lemmy and Reddit lack, they aren’t even in the same problem space.
The platforms that actually utilize discourse effectively are some of the best to work on. Similar communities on social media platforms don’t have anywhere near the level of quality, engagement, knowledge, or problem solving. Even simple features that encourage engagement in months or years old threads are massive boon.
It really is not much of a step to take your logic and replace lemmy or Reddit with Discord as a Q&A support and knowledge base platform. Which we all know is a terrible idea, and largely leads to a loss of knowledge and destroys discoverability.
Overall I get the feeling that you may not have experienced what makes that platform powerful? Which understandably can lead to thoughts that it’s “just another forum”, and that it is supplementable with a social media platform (which in the reality of it is laughably bad).
Check out forum.babylonjs.com for example. The framework is an absolute pain in the ass to onboard too but because their forum is just so damn good, it was a breeze compared to others.
Let me address some of your points:
Linear post structure, sorting based on latest response, so it is a traditional in vein of old BBS/phpBB systems.
Upvote based sorting and nested comment structure means StackExchange/Overflow is closer to reddit than it is Discourse.
Reddit, Lemmy, and Discourse are all public forums, Discord is a chatroom.
Thread necromancy for month/year old dead threads has always been considered offenses to almost every single forum, which is why most forums lock posts after a month or so. It’s not a feature, it’s a fundamental flaw with the sorting.
I’m genuinely curious, what are some of those features? I can’t think of any significant one, outside of tags.
Forums are ultimately shaped by people, so I would say these forum succeeded in spite of the software instead of because of the software.