Scott M. Stolz

I am an entrepreneur, small business owner, author, and researcher. I am also working on an open source project called Neuhub.

I am posting from Hubzilla with Neuhub via ActivityPub.

  • 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 18th, 2023

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  • @Kichae Ideally, people should be notified that they are posting to a forum and not replying to a post on an individual channel, that way we can set some expectations in advance.

    I am not sure how ActivityPub handles it, but Hubzilla somehow communicates with other Hubzilla instances that a particular channel is a forum. It’s probably communicated in webfinger, or something like that.

    Just having an icon, tag, or Bootstrap-style badge next to a channel saying “forum” would be helpful.


  • @Microw

    What does Hubzilla have that gives them better tools to fight this?

    By default, you only see posts from people you follow, and replies to their posts. And by replies, we mean replies to each particular thread.

    Unlike Mastodon, all posts and replies are part of a thread (like a forum post or a Facebook-style social media post). Both the administrator and the person who started the thread can delete comments within that thread.

    This also means you can unfollow specific conversations (threads) while continuing following someone’s channel.

    With Mastodon, people can randomly mention you and you are notified of the post. With Hubzilla, this is turned off by default, although you can turn it on if you want. Spammers can’t spam you by mentioning you.

    And then there are the various ways to block channels.

    So spammers can’t get into your inbox very easily, and if they do, they are easy to block.


  • It would be nice if Direct Messages (DMs) or Private Messages (PMs) were treated like email and only sent to the people you are sending it to.

    But generally, on most platforms, if you mention someone in the top level post, they are assumed to be on the recipient list. (Note, some platforms, like Mastodon, treat every post as if it were a top level post.)

    Hubzilla has more privacy features, which prevents your messages from leaking to others, but part of that is because we use the Zot protocol between Hubzilla instances, and can set privacy at the thread level (i.e. the permissions of the top level post is the permissions for the entire thread).

    When the same conversation is sent via ActivityPub, we lose a lot of control over the privacy of that post. We can and do address it to specific recipients, but other platforms don’t have the same types of access controls, which means we can’t enforce the access control list for that conversation on those platforms.



  • For reference, Hubzilla renders both the same way.

    If you “share” someone’s post (what Mastodon users call a “quote post”) is basically just:

    @channel@example.com [quote]Whatever they said.[/quote]
    

    which gets translated to:

    @channel@example.com<blockquote>Whatever they said.</blockquote>
    

    If someone quotes someone’s post in a forum, it is the same exact thing.

    And users can also add their own blockquotes to posts by using the BBCode [quote] tags too.

    It’s all blockquotes.

    Note: This posts uses <code> blocks. This may not render properly on all platforms.




  • I totally understand the issue with the number of hours in the day. I have a lot of projects going too.

    I am working on creating an ecosystem of websites that all use Magic Signon (OpenWebAuth). Social media websites, forum communities, productivity apps, online courses, etc. You can use the same social identity to log into all of them.

    The more projects that support it, the more people will use it.

    A forum project like yours would make a great addition. :-)