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.
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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.
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 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
We can already view mastodon threads that are linear inside 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.
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: https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117
This could be the new “redditor answers my question” place for me 🤯🎉
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 https://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:
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.
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.
thats cool ngl
eVeRYOnE defederate immediately! It will flood our community with new users and be awful!
Spicy
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.
Heck–it was designed to be like that, even Reddit archivesa thread after 6 months right?
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.
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.
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?
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Ah so unrelated to Facebook. Good
It’s funny seeing how different a reaction people have to the same basic thing happening.
Discourse is 100% open source. Meta is basically 0% open source. Big, big difference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
