Live testing of remote categories
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#^https://community.nodebb.org/inbox delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden 2025-03-30 22:51:57
#^https://community.nodebb.org/inbox delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden 2025-03-30 23:28:55@scott@loves.tech Hubzilla is formatting its Notes in a manner I wasn’t expecting.
- The group actor is the
attributedTo, which is not possible in NodeBB - The note itself is not addressed to the group actor, only its followers collection
- There is no way to discern without parsing the note content itself who authored the original note.
So at present while I would be able to retrieve the note, without a proper backreference to the group actor, I don’t think I can slot it correctly.
Not sure why the received activity is returning a 403, as well.
- The group actor is the
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Forgot to cc @mario@hub.somaton.com re: the above.
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@julian I saw a NodeBB test on Hubzilla Monster. I'm guessing that was you.
In order for you to properly mention someone, the Hubzilla server needs to know about that actor first. The easiest way to achieve this is to follow (connect to) that actor. This adds the actor to the database. This only needs to be done if no one on the server is following them or being followed by them.
This does create an extra step if the actor is unknown to the server, but it does force spammers to follow unknown actors before they can mention them. -
@julian @Mario Vavti That is one thing that I wish Hubzilla did, and that is identify the author of the original note (top level post in a forum), both internally in the database and in a variable available to themes, and externally via Zot protocol and ActivityPub.
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@julian in Hubzilla the group actor will fork the original post with a quote reshare. Hence
attributedTois set to the group actor. IIRC the author of the original post is being stored for refernce but we currently do not use this info.
@Scott M. Stolz -
@julian in Hubzilla the group actor will fork the original post with a quote reshare. Hence
attributedTois set to the group actor. IIRC the author of the original post is being stored for refernce but we currently do not use this info.
@Scott M. Stolz@mario@hub.somaton.com since Hubzilla posts (incl. yours) are making it in fine I’m assuming this is only for the “forum” feature?
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@julian right.
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@julian in Hubzilla the group actor will fork the original post with a quote reshare. Hence
attributedTois set to the group actor. IIRC the author of the original post is being stored for refernce but we currently do not use this info.
@Scott M. Stolz@Mario Vavti If we exposed the original author to the Hubzilla UI as a variable and via Zot and ActivityPub, it would allow the UI to display the author of the first post instead of or in addition to the name of the forum.
I understand that on the backend it may be desirable to have the first post in a forum owned by the forum for backwards compatibility with platforms that don't support groups, but the UI does not have to display the first post with the forum as the author. We have the information about the author of the first post, so might as well display it. -
@julian in Hubzilla the group actor will fork the original post with a quote reshare. Hence
attributedTois set to the group actor. IIRC the author of the original post is being stored for refernce but we currently do not use this info.
@Scott M. Stolz@Mario Vavti @julian Another compatibility issue that we may need to look at is permissions to post. Hubzilla can restrict posts and comments to only being from people following the forum, for example. It also has a moderated mode, which will accept posts from unknown actors, but will place it in a moderation queue. So it may be desirable to turn off the ability to comment if the permissions to comment are not permitted for a particular actor. -
@Mario Vavti If we exposed the original author to the Hubzilla UI as a variable and via Zot and ActivityPub, it would allow the UI to display the author of the first post instead of or in addition to the name of the forum.
I understand that on the backend it may be desirable to have the first post in a forum owned by the forum for backwards compatibility with platforms that don't support groups, but the UI does not have to display the first post with the forum as the author. We have the information about the author of the first post, so might as well display it.@Scott M. Stolz i think this would be very misleading. But this discussion does not belong here. -
@Scott M. Stolz i think this would be very misleading. But this discussion does not belong here.@Mario Vavti Okay. Deleting the post.
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@julian we have recently rewritten the addressing logic and it seems mapping the mentions to
tofor public toplevel posts has fallen short. After fixing this it seems to work fine now: #^https://community.nodebb.org/topic/cbbf1640-2295-4fc5-b86f-5b1fd259cccb/test2
@Scott M. Stolz -
@julian we have recently rewritten the addressing logic and it seems mapping the mentions to
tofor public toplevel posts has fallen short. After fixing this it seems to work fine now: #^https://community.nodebb.org/topic/cbbf1640-2295-4fc5-b86f-5b1fd259cccb/test2
@Scott M. Stolz@mario@hub.somaton.com that’s wonderful to hear! Thank you so much.
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Some of the remote categories appear to be broken now.
These are the Flipboard magazines NodeBB is currently aware of when searching “flipboard” in the search page:
- [Tech News by @theverge@flipboard.com](https://community.nodebb.org/category/tech-news-theverge@flipboard.com)
- [Musik News by @musikexpressde@flipboard.com](https://community.nodebb.org/category/musik-news-musikexpressde@flipboard.com)
- [Gear by @engadget@flipboard.com](https://community.nodebb.org/category/gear-engadget@flipboard.com)
However, that very first one (tech news by The Verge) does not work; going to it gives a 404 page instead.
Something else appears to have happened to the Vivaldi Blog remote category (a WordPress blog). A week ago it was working fine, but now, searching for it lists it twice in the search page. Each listing indicates a completely different number of posts and topics for the remote category.
Even weirder though most of the topics that are correctly slotted into it, they are not actually in the category page, e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/a85b0eff-5219-46ba-9ad4-a5d417a7bec5/minor-update-2-for-vivaldi-desktop-browser-7.3
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Actually, I think I know what’s going on with the Vivaldi blog group actor - it’s not necessarily NodeBB’s fault.
Inspecting the AP objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog, all the English-written blog posts have their
as:audiencefield set tohttps://vivaldi.com/?author=0.Meanwhile, every other blog post that is written in a different language instead have it set to
https://vivaldi.com//?author=0, so for Japanese blog posts, for example, it ishttps://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=0.And all these URLs link to different group actors, but all of them have the same value on the
preferredUsernameandwebfingerproperties:blog, andblog@vivaldi.com. -
@AltCode okay! Thanks for reporting, it sounds like there are two issues going on:
- Categories losing their handle-to-id association
- Frustratingly, this read very similarly to #13283, and both remote users and categories share similar logic. I have so far not been able to reproduce it at all on local development.
- Separate users (different IDs) sharing the same
preferredUsername.- This is an interesting one, and I am not entirely sure where the fault lies. I wonder how other software handles it?
- Categories losing their handle-to-id association
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@AltCode I forked this out to a new topic. I think it’s time to loop @pfefferle@mastodon.social into the conversation (at the very least so this could be potentially escalated).
Mattias, it seems that when the WPML and ActivityPub plugins are enabled together, notes federated out by the blog user in another language have different
ids but the samepreferredUsername.e.g.
ruari@vivaldi.com: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46andhttps://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46NodeBB interprets this as two different users. Curiously, Mastodon does not, the second ID explicitly does not resolve.
So there can be two solutions here:
- The underlying issue can be fixed by WordPress, the solution of which is out of scope (for me at least)
- NodeBB can adopt whatever mechanism Mastodon is using… which is most likely that Mastodon does a two-way when asserting an ID, and ensures that the webfinger resource points to the ID.
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The remaining questions here are:
- whether
preferredUsernameis meant to be unique to the instance (in which case having multipleids point to an identicalpreferredUsernamewould be a violation), and - what exactly AP software should do when it encounters this situation… store a list of “known alias” IDs? There are potential security issues to doing so.
- whether
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@AltCode all three flipboard remote categories seem to be working now
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This is getting out of hand! Now, there are six of them!
