julian

Just realized I'm going to have to add "hand-crafted" to the list of adjectives to describe my code.

Didn't think that needed to be said, yet here we are.

I was talking to my marketing guy about integrating a tags-based onboarding workflow for freshly installed forums.

The gist of it is, the forum admin adds a couple tags for the forum to globally follow, and achieves this via fedibuzz relay or tags.pub. Auto-categorization rules are automatically added and the forum starts receiving new (highly relevant!) posts through the magic of hashtag+federation ✨

He then asked whether it was possible to suggest related tags (e.g. add guitar suggest acousticguitar, electricguitar, etc.) for the admin to also add, to which I replied in the negative "for now".

But that got me thinking, is this something fedibuzz or tags.pub could achieve/offer in its API?[...] It would require a bit of data analysis, to match up common hashtag usage, but doable maybe?

cc @evan @evan" aria-label="Profile: evan@cosocial.ca">@evan@cosocial.ca @astro@c3d2.social

There was supposed to be a ForumWG meeting this week, but due to low turnout, and the fact that most threadiverse implementors couldn't actually make the meeting time, I have decided to indefinitely postpone the monthly meetings in favour of discussions on @forum-wg directly.

Note once again that the new address is @forum-wg — the old address (@forum-wg@community.nodebb.org) will publish a Move to migrate its followers at some point to this new address.

The next version of NodeBB (v4.10.0) will ship with the ability to set alt-text with images :writing_hand:

While this was already natively supported in-site, the alt text wasn't federated out until now.

Thanks to @kirk@social.coop who filed the original bug report (a long time ago actually :grimacing:)

I've been so busy preparing for FediMTL the past two weeks that I totally forgot to actually register for the FediForum unworkshop!

Oops! :sweat_smile: I look forward to reading the discussions that ensue from it though.

There are a couple of parallel development efforts tackling the problem of hashtags. The main drawback is that while you can use them in your posts and search for them to find additional content, the reach and visibility of the hashtag is restricted to that of the instance's own visibility.

In other words, looking up a hashtag on your instance probably would not give you a complete view of the use of that hashtag worldwide.

1. @newsmast@newsmast.social channels
   • The first I'd heard of it was Newsmast's "channels". How they worked was opaque to me, but after seeing @saskia@backend.newsmast.org's presentation, I now know it is collating use of hashtags into a broader topic (e.g. #Asenal, #AFC, plus many others into "Arsenal")
2. tags.pub
   • @evan@cosocial.ca came up to me after FediMTL and asked whether I'd looked into his FOSDEM presentation about tags.pub, which aims to do something similar, although user-facing. Users can follow individual "tag" actors and they then receive all content tagged as such.
   • I will have to watch the presentation as tags.pub is headless and has no landing page! :laughing:
3. FediBuzz Relay
   • ActivityPub.Space is following this approach, where I set up NodeBB to subscribe to a couple of relevant FediBuzz relays: #activitypub, #fedidev, #fediadmin, #fedimod and #fedimods

It's interesting to follow the convergent evolution of solutions to solve a single problem. Right now NodeBB gives you the tools to set up the FediBuzz relay connection + auto-categorization rules, but it's not exactly user-friendly for admins.

The ideal flow would be something much more high level for admins. An additional field during category creation where they can specify hashtags they'd like to follow globally. Simple, understandable, hides all the backend complexity away.

It is worth looking into additional solutions (like tags.pub or the Newsmast channels) so as to not be tied to a single provider in the backend.

@johannab@cosocial.ca asks:

NodeBB strikes me as the best aligned of the extant platforms for municipal governments. Here's a question for julian: is he prepared for, or interested in, a promotion program to city-scale organizations?

To which I answered, simply: "Yes."

Now that I have the time to expand on my answer:

Yes, absolutely! There is definitely a space for municipal city-scale adoption of the fediverse through properties that they alone control, but federate widely. [...]

I imagine a local-fedi where my mayor posts via olivia@toronto.ontario.gc.ca, and she can talk to her constituents on neighbourhood-level instances like bloorwest.social or danforth.space, or anybody worldwide via the power of the fediverse.

Right now we're in the unfortunate position where the city is posting notices to X/Twitter, and cross-posting to Facebook and Instagram. I would bet a lot of money most other municipalities are doing the exact same thing. Adding in the fediverse should be straightforward, and I welcome any opportunity to make it happen.

Let's make some connections!

Here we go!

Since FediCon last year I try to do a livestream of the fedi events I go to. This is the start of the FediMTL livestream.

Let's see how well I can keep this up 😅

FediMTL streaming tickets still available! 50% off for fedi friends with code SWF50 😊

https://lepointdevente.com/billets/mns260224002?lang=en

@sk@utsukta.org mentioned in another thread that the way Hubzilla and threadiverse software handle group discussions is incompatible. It got me thinking about whether that is true. At its core both FEPs (171b and 1b12, respectively) rely on a central "distributor" node to send activities to recipients. @silverpill@mitra.social did further comparisons in thr text of 171b itself: Announce activity is used instead of Add. Conversation and related activities are synchronized between participants, but conversation backfilling mechanism is not specified. The questions here are: If threadiverse software federated out an Add in addition to Announce, would that satisfy basic synchronization (not backfill) requirements laid out by 171b? Is there any reason why Announce could not be used to facilitate private federated group discussions as well? Assuming visibility maintains scoped to addresses, I don't see any immediate reason why not...

@travisfw@fosstodon.org federate sparingly with production instances, and federate against activitypub.academy regularly. Even I am guilty of testing in production however 😅

Feelin' FOMO over missing FOSDEM, but this does make up for it a little bit. There is however another ActivityPub conference by @paige@masto.canadiancivil.com in Montreal next month (I'm even speaking there, hopefully!), so looking to get my fix there.

Can you guess when I turned Anubis back on?

• Grey line (left-hand; y-axis) tracks page views
• Blue line (right-hand; y-axis) tracks unique users

You can even see the spike in traffic that brought down the site hard enough that I got my butt in gear to tune Anubis and turn it back on.

Based on the numbers here, there is a thirteen-fold decrease in activity (or a ~92% drop in traffic), all identified by Anubis as bots and blocked.

Selective adjustments were made to the nginx config and anubis bot policy to allow certain bits of traffic through (for unimpeded federation, etc.), but otherwise the site is now quite stable, on a small potato server. :potato:

Default bot policy does let search engine crawlers though (I think), so that is win-win.

Thank you so much @cadey@pony.social, my next stop is your GitHub Sponsors page.