Chebucto Regional Softball Club

I've been noticing a lot more hanging follow requests with/from Lemmy since upgrading to 4.1. It's not consistent, though -- some Lemmy sites continue to process them fine, and some don't. I initially thought it had to do with the Lemmy version, but I'm seeing both behaviours from 0.19.9, so... \*shrug\*.

[@trwnh@mastodon.social](https://community.nodebb.org/user/trwnh%40mastodon.social) Yes, I'm familiar with the gripes of the fediverse old guard, and all I can say to them is "maybe you shouldn't use an open protocol if you don't want it to be *open*". Or maybe they should embrace the inevitable network split, which seemingly everyone in the space cannot stop wringing their hands over. You don't get to make a private club in the middle of the public park, and crying that all of these people keep showing up every morning to walk their dog is absurd.

[@trwnh@mastodon.social](https://community.nodebb.org/user/trwnh%40mastodon.social) I don't think the discussion is about user adoption, though. I don't think that there's any question that the fediverse still isn't ready for "normie" use. The fediverse still doesn't know what it is. It's an emergent space, and we have no idea what this looks like in practice when there's enough people or alternative platforms to stop playing a combination of "rugged individualist on my one-man self-hosted ultra-linux fruit-pie that I built into my own self-pleasure device" and "uncanny make-believe centralized social media". I think the core complaint that Julian is responding to is one of developers trying to make products that someone might actually want to use, and that aren't weird and masturbatory personal art projects. The fediverse is full of arthouse auteur programmers.

This has been an attitude more generally on Mastodon over the 3 years that I've been there. There's this deep undercurrent of "finally, we're getting the attention we deserve" but also "shut up and let us talk". It seems that people who are used to being the only people in the room are craving an audience, not *people actually using their toys*. There's a group of people -- developers or otherwise -- that saw the fediverse as their private little sandbox, and openly resent anyone else coming into the space, or at the very least, anyone else coming into their space and not following their rules. It's been a significant blocker to adoption for the platform, and for the fediverse as a whole.

One of the issues that I have with almost every other major Fediverse engine is that it can be summed up as "Big centralized commercial social media, but with a worse UX". They all ape the design language of centralized services, and then make them more complicated by federating. The biggest ones really seem to go out of their way to hide the fact that you're talking to people on other websites. I have major issues with Mastodon's quite attempts to make every Mastodon website look exactly the same. But they're basically all guilty of trying to look like something they're not, in a way that fundamentally limits what the fediverse can be. Or really, what it really is. Bulletin boards get to come at this problem from the totally opposite side. They are things that have *always* distributed, and their users don't have this expectation of having everything in one place all of the time. Neither NodeBB nor Discourse are trying to create a seamless, drop-in experience for Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram users, and because of that it opens up a huge design space. And also a hugely *undefined* design space. I agree that /world is wanting. As a microblog space, it suffers from the forum post norms of title+body (something which has never made it into microblogging), with the result that many short-but-not-quite-short-enough posts require you to click through, only to get 3 or 4 more words than what were displayed in the auto-generated titile. As a remote forum space, it suffers from the disorganization mentioned here. But still, as a first step into this new mesh social network, there's something really, *really* cool about it. But man, do I ever desperately want the bulletin board experience in /world. It really feels like what the fediverse was always meant to be, to me.

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) I have the same hesitations around having categories follow user accounts. Most users are not categories, and they do not post categorically. But some are. Satire accounts. Bot accounts. Institutional accounts, as you've called out. These are fairly safe bets, and it would be nice to allow admins the choice to roll the dice. But another paradigm to explore is *lists*, and there are a number of ways to represent those. /world could be reconfigured into /feed (stepping on the toes of the Feeds plugin), with users being able to create arbitrary feeds for themselves. Or lists could be represented as user-created pseudo-categories, given the UX of a forum category, but being personal to the user. They could be presented in /world exclusively, or appended to the bottom of the user's categories list. Forum-wide lists could be considered, creating global pseudo-categories defined by admins or moderators, with a slightly modified layout and/or visual language. This is really the transformation of a long standing medium. There's a huge possibility and design space here.

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) "We're making a super cool product that's adopting this space" tends to go over well in the Fediverse, yeah. We love being catered to with cool toys and tools! And good God do I miss real forums, after a decade on Reddit.

[@eeeee](/user/eeeee%40community.nodebb.org) From this website, you can follow almost any user account you want on almost any Mastodon-, Lemmy-, mbin-, PixelFed-, Misskey- (and its forks), Hometown-, Friendica-, Hubzilla-, or Mitra-based website, barring a few minor obstacles (neither side needs to have blocked the other, neither side needs to have disabled federation, and the user you're following needs to have not blocked you). You can also follow groups like Lemmy communities, or Guppe groups. There's really no need to have accounts on all platforms. Not unless you want to have separation between what you post, or want the variation in UX that comes with all of these different pieces of software focusing on different core experiences. What's important to know is that they work via syndication -- content is mirrored across the network, not viewed insitu -- and that syndication doesn't occur without prompting. So, you need to go through the steps of entering a remote user or group's url or full account address (username@host.tld) in order to fetch content, and that content, by and large, is not backfilled. If you can accept these limitations, then a single Mastodon, mbin, nodeBB, etc. account is all you need.

I can no longer reproduce the issue!

[@julian](https://community.nodebb.org/user/julian) That's the URL I've tried to use. It just won't fetch it for some reason. But if I search any of the comments, it'll pull it in just fine. https://community.nodebb.org/post/103252, for instance, pulls the whole thread in. Restarting nodeBB renders your missing comment, though!

I was looking at [this post](https://community.nodebb.org/topic/d9a56cb0-3d17-4d72-a9f7-592421e1c9d1/what-s-a-good-lightweight-good-moderation-tools-foss-forum-system-these-days) from my own forum (nBB 4.0.3) via various vectors, and trying to pull it in from here resulted in a couple of hiccups. 1) Searching the posts community.nodebb.org URL did not pull the post and its comments. Naturally, searching the original URL works fine (though does not fetch the comments, naturally) 2) Fetching *my* comment from that post *does* fetch the post and full comment chain, but *your* comment, [@julian](https://community.nodebb.org/user/julian), is surprisingly empty ([link](https://chebucto.club/topic/da972ef2-9ab5-40d0-8b0f-3cfe7f410554/the-masochist-in-me-is-wondering-if-running-a-forum-to-act-as-a-meeting-point-for-questions-and-self-help-around-the-onlinesafetyact-and-to-aid-coordination-might-be-useful.../4?_=1739386935891))  Just thought you'd like to know.

Just gotta say -- and I know I'm pulling OT a bit here -- but watching a Mastodon thread play out in a proper forum UI is kind of magical.

Reddit is a single place where people can go, it has a mobile app that streamlines sign-up, it's a reasonably big and familiar name, and it has a subreddit for *everything*. The modern Internet user access stuff through their phone, and is primarily about content ingestion. An app and a boat load of diverse content snags them. And forum users have been migrating there for years now because it's more active on the topics they care about. For a lot of us, we used small forums, and losing even a small percentage of users to big corporate social media turned those spaces into ghost towns as the user count dropped below critical levels.

[@rynach@mstdn.io](https://community.nodebb.org/user/rynach%40mstdn.io) Lemmy isn't a forum, though. There's much more to being a forum than just having *topics*. Basic moderation tools (like post splitting, merging) etc. are lacking, and more advanced features that have been longtime standards on forums are totally absent. The UX is that of Reddit, and Reddit is as much a forum as Twitter is a blog. And LemmyBB hasn't been updated in iver 2 years. Does it even work with the current back end?

I tried to sync [@testing@chebucto.club](https://community.nodebb.org/user/testing%40chebucto.club) with @testing-ground.

[@julian](https://community.nodebb.org/user/julian) said in [Is ActivityPub too complicated?](/post/102887): > Let me look into nodebb-to-nodebb folllowing, that definitely should be working! Have you had a chance to verified that it is? Because I'm getting a never-ending Pending status when trying to sync to @testing-ground. Things federate fine, but without the syncing being established, they either don't get addressed to my instance, or are dumped into /world if I specifically reference someone on my site. And it's a little weird that they're not all ending up in /world, because I have an account that's following @testing-ground.

Hmm. It did not. [@mrjafo@chebucto.club](https://community.nodebb.org/user/mrjafo%40chebucto.club) test?

Confirmed not auto-syncing with @testing@chebucto.club. This mention should force the sync.

This topic should be auto-syncing with my own, but I don't think the handshake has completed successfully. Let's see if this shows up.

Pushed out just fine. Let's see the return.