Farvel Big Tech

@Mario Vavti Okay. Deleting the post.

One thing that you have to consider is that some forums and categories might have post permissions attached to them. For example, many Hubzilla forums restrict creating new posts to members of the forum. (To become a member of a forum, you would need to connect to or follow the forum, and then be allowed to join by the administrator, either automatically or by admin approval.) In that case, not everyone can create a new top level post. There may also be comment restrictions as well, regarding who can comment on a post in the forum.

If you were to cross post between multiple forums or categories, if you want them to be synced, you would have to take into account the relevant permissions, and decide what to do with posts that don't conform.

One option is for the admin of a forum to allow which other forums they allow a full sync (ignoring existing forum permissions and providing an exception for other trusted forums). If a cross-posted post comes from a non-trusted forum, then no exceptions will be allowed and the existing forum permissions are enforced.

Of course, nothing has to be done about this and we can just let the forums enforce their own permissions. But if we don't communicate these permissions, some users might not realize why their cross-post has been silently dropped since the UI does not make it clear that a user had to be a member of certain forums to post to that forum.

@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.

@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.

@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.

#^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

By the way, we also have a test forum set up here: @Neuhub Test Forum

#^https://neuhub.org/channel/testforum

@julian I just tried posting five different posts from Hubzilla to @Testing Ground via various methods, and none are showing up.

1. Post from a group actor, selecting audience from list.
2. Post from a group actor, using a mention.
3. Post from a normal actor, selecting audience from list.
4. Post from a normal actor, using a mention.
5. Post from a normal actor, posting to a Hubzilla Forum (group actor) and mentioning the NodeBB category in the post.

I am not sure if that forum is moderated, but none of my posts are showing up.

@julian

But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you're able to change addressing based on where you create the post.

Yes, in Hubzilla, we can click on the padlock and select who the post is addressed to, including NodeBB forums. I haven't tried it yet, but Hubzilla does recognize NodeBB categories as "forums."

@julian I'm not sure. They changed things in the last major version when they adopted FEP 171b Conversation Containers.

Some examples of forum channels are @Hubzilla Support Forum and @Neuhub Support Forum.

@julian How do you deal with situations where the group actor also sends posts?

For example, on Hubzilla, (streams), and Forte, the top level post of a forum thread is from the forum, not the user. This was originally done for Mastodon compatibility since it did not understand threaded conversations and groups. They could follow the forum as if it were a user, and receive all of the forum posts. They could send a DM to the forum to create a new post.

NodeBB took a different approach, using boosts to distribute user posts to people who follow the forum. And I think you said you use mentions within a post to create a new top level post.

How are we handling the differences in approaches?

Since they are federated out to other platforms, each platform decides how to use them. Some platforms will use your hashtags to categorize similar posts, sometimes making post searchable by hashtag. But the exact functionality depends on the platform that received the post.

Amazing work. Congratulations on this milestone!