@julian yes yes yes yes!

Years ago when i first looked at NodeBB, I was thinking about it for a discussion-focused social network (kind of like the old tribe.net, or Facebook/Myspace groups), and this was a key area where forum software in general didn't meet my needs -- and it wasn't obvious how to extend it. So I rolled my own as a prototype and it's stayed as a prototype for a dozen years because trying to do a full-fledged implementation that's maintainable and scalable requires implementing a forum system, decidedly non-trivial.

@julian I mean sure, I would recommend that option be off by default with a way to turn on in the configuration file, but otherwise it sounds like a great idea. Btw, why does your post appear with a content warning which is identical to the post text?

julian Yes, I am very much interested in nodebb giving users the capability to create groups and moderate those.

johannab@cosocial.ca I don't actually know how the Ravelry community is built up, are they sub communities around a centralized discussion board?

jdp23@neuromatch.social well that's for sure... every once in awhile I see a company or org roll their own forums because "how hard could it be"

I had that misconception once... A decade ago.

Thanks for the input!

esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club NodeBB publishes the ActivityStreams "Article" type, which Mastodon current doesn't have good support for.

One way around it is to send summary with the full text... but then some other software thinks it's an uber long content warning. There's no winning

@julian

Geez I gotta find a way to demo this to Fedi people.

So, Ravelry never meant to be a social site AFAIK. They had a handful of "Forums" that were to be online help oriented, dialogue with either the site's developers, or their contracted or volunteer knitting & yarn & pattern experts. Then they added "groups" which included a forum, and some Pages (static info for the Group), few other things AND IT WENT NUTS.

And it has somehow remained the most civilized social network ever.

@julian There's no "main" vs. "sub", other than by default all users join (and can leave) the "Big 6" official Ravelry forums.

Groups are all subject to Ravelry's TOS but can be created by anyone, any topic. There are lots of abandoned or inactive ones, and they could probably do a clean up (but also probably ... don't need to bother?)

Ravelry users belong to as many groups as they want to bother with, under one ID.

It's a unique site. Even if there was no emulating it, it's a case study.

johannab@cosocial.ca that's really interesting, and bears further study

I love hearing stories about community building that happens against all odds!

@julian yeah really. in my defence I knew it was hard to do anything scalable. The prototype was good enough to explore several potential directions but the answer kept being that they could potentially work as customizations/extensions of a an existing (scalable, accessible, secure, highly customizable, very flexible) underlying platform with great moderation support, but that didn't exist yet and wow it was not the kind of thing i could just code up on my own.

I do think that for this to work the support for moderation has to be quite good both at the per-group level and at the site level. Community moderation and per-group moderation, if done well, can help a lot with the scalability. Still, site-wide moderators still have to deal with rogue and abandoned groups, and situations where group-level moderation leaves people at risk).

Of course you actually need site-wide moderation to deal with most of that stuff things if the site admin creates all the categories. And user-created categories/forums/whatever are something that would be really useful in a lot of differnet use cases, so IMHO really worth focusing on!

@julian @esoteric_programmer I think this should be reported to GoToSocial devs, because they can use name as content warning for Article objects.

Maybe there is already issue for that, but I couldn't find it

gotosocial

gotosocial - Fast, fun, small ActivityPub server.

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

silverpill@mitra.social esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club It got closed

[bug] `as:summary` is used as content warning descriptor for object types other than `as:Note`

gotosocial - Fast, fun, small ActivityPub server.

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

@julian @silverpill yeah, so apparently you're using it wrong? activity pub is confusing indeed, but yeah, summary should probably include just the title

@julian @silverpill also, for whatever reason, your post contained mentions twice for the same people

julian You're going into a place I was going to suggest around 2022 (becasue forums have been on the decline for a long time), while this sub-reddit-eaque is a neat feature, what about thinking of "ways" of being instead.

If you think about supporting or looking for inspiration in terms of feature roadmap, where next for then NodeBB as a content creation platform, extra of being a forum, is when you start to unlock the true potential.

You might rememeber I pointed out substack some years ago and it wasn't that familiar to you or most back then, it was the lockdowns and covid allowed it go prime time IMHO.

So here is a concept you might consider.

1. NodeLET (Solo) a stepped down versions of a full NodeBB that is content creator centric (it may not allow more than one user, it might limit users, it can have tiered plans, it hosted but NodeBB, it's liek NOdeBB for one user that can bu spun up like droplet are spun up on DO in seconds)

Think of NodeLET as content hub as opposed to a hub for users.

2. NodeBB with NodeLET functionally (integrated)

What is NodeLET?

NodeLET is hosted by NodeBB in-house as a service, (think wordpress.blog but technically spun up liek a DO droplet) the user does not need admin level they are content creation focused, they just need composer, draft and the tags fundamentally to organise content, forums, sub categories etc, might not even be needed. Stripped back, you get the idea.

Now that you have activity pub you can use this to hook up NodeLET to other NodeBB's and beyond, and so so on.

Content creation space for the quiet content creator who wants a nice place to go and tap without distraction and mange their more long form thoughtful content over time.

Does this make sense?

The idea is a NodeLET would start as a free service for content creators, now that substack exists which came to my attention after I thought of this way of re-selling or re-spinning NodeBB that market is well established in terms of a simpel offering to the content creator.

It's a new market segment because no one did it so well and elegantly until substack came along IMHO.

Focusing on content creation, but still being a very different option than say a WordPress vs substack option.

All my UI suggestions are generally based around content creation centric idea of NodeLET but I never explained it properly, but if you're gonna do sub-reddit you might as well emrbace the whole spectrum of user-needs potential dev led pat or "ways" of being, as opposed to what others are doing.

Build for the user you missed or forgot about, because NodeBB can do it all technically, as I've pointed out most of the ability is already under the hood, it exists, it's actually a matter or reconfiguring layout, how you offer the capabilities to the potential user / marketing (Harmony theme actually works well here)

Offer 2 configuration, of NodeBB that's another way

• Solo (limited, free) A Single user NodeBB offering.
• Solo Plus (fee, more features) A single user NodeBB for closed content creation group
• NodeBB (Full) What we all know and love.

Bonus is all of these options can openly interconnect now, where back a few years they may have not so easily - Activity Pub is the thing that didn't exist when I was thinking about this, because as I've alluded to or implied it goes back to an even older idea I had when trying to solve a problem 2012, when I saw substack it looked the slowest to it. Over a decade later.

Since you have integrated activity-pub deeply and mastered it (I assume you have not following things) you could now create a NodeBB universe of NodeBB (powerhouse mega NodeBB) and NodeLET all interacting and interconnecting

I'd really like to be able to, and within seconds, with a single email address and password sign up for a stripped down NodeLET Acc and be typing happily (content creating) within seconds, that I could then disturbute to wherever whenever with a few clicks, get analytics back on where it is being seen and how much and maybe even track payment for effort too, without being a site owner or carrying any of that "publishing" at scale burden.

That' the bones of the original 2012 idea.

I know I'm sliding off topic but it's out of my head now.

esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club respectfully there is no other way to get an Article object ingested by Mastodon without being munged without shoving it all into summary.

Summary should contain a truncation probably, but other than that it's GtS that is "doing it wrong".

@julian if we weren't constrained by what mastodon does or it implemented the article activity type properly, would this still be done the same way? yeah, I suppose technically gts is wrong for not implementing the mastodon behaviour as well because it's nonstandard, same as they mandate authorised fetch like functionality for everything that federates with gts, but yet they support some other nonstandard things themselves, which exist only because mastodon does it this way, so they're kinda inconsistent there. I wish more servers would implement the client-server part of the activity pub protocol for example, but that too is blocked because everyone making clients for the fedi targets the mastodon API from what I know, so yeah, sad indeed.
Btw, other threadiverse platforms, like lemmy and py-fed, don't have this issue on my end, where I could follow them because they support authorised fetch that is. I wonder how do they do it? or...hmm, maybe they don't work properly on mastodon while they do on gts?

esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club I'm sorry I got a bit salty about it.

Basically if Mastodon were not in the equation we would send an Article with a name and no summary at all. Threadiverse implementations handle that perfectly already.

GtS actually did implement the Mastodon behaviour! Content warnings were their thing (afaik), done by adopting summary as the CW. GtS followed suit but applied this to all objects, not just notes. So in this case GtS went a bit further is all.

@julian ahh, gotcha. And what would happen now if you didn't include summary at all?

esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club Mastodon would show the title and URL, and the content would be excised out.

Which I suppose is so fine insofar that sometimes long form content is best read on the originating site, but end users want their content read natively on Mastodon