Channel Apps

9 months ago
scott@loves.tech
I had a great time at Day 1 of Fediforum today. An online "unconference" where the attendees create the agenda and organize their own sessions.

There were a lot of sessions on different topics. I wish I could attend them all.

One of the sessions that I participated in was about the threadiverse, which includes platforms that use threaded conversations, such as forums, discussion boards, and Facebook-style social media platforms. 

Since our platforms are more feature-rich than microblogging platforms, we have slightly different needs when it comes to federating with different platforms, and the Mastodon way of federating doesn't necessarily work for us. So we have to come up with some way to be compatible with Mastodon, but still support federating the advanced features that Mastodon doesn't have.

We created an informal working group, and I look forward to participating in it.
8 months ago
starrwulfe@zotum.net
One thing I was wondering when Wordpress embraced ActivityPub and brought development of the plugin for it in-house, was if there could be some "more than Mastodon-style federation" thought about since it too can be extended.
8 months ago
scott@loves.tech
@J L Gatewood I suspect that their initial interest was in allowing people to follow blogs and authors via ActivityPub, and to allow people to comment on posts via ActivityPub. This would help with engagement, and would also help with the spam problem, since comments are tied to a user, and users can be blocked.

It should be noted that Mastodon uses only a portion of the ActivityPub spec, and sometimes uses ActivityPub in non-standard or unique ways. This is natural since Mastodon is a microblogging platform like pre-X Twitter, and does not need advanced features such as threaded conversations, privacy, or access control. Platforms that have these advanced features used ActivityPub in a different way than Mastodon does.

I think that over time, we will see more FEPs related to blogs and forums, which will move ActivityPub away from being just a social media protocol.