@julian Yeah, it's been a long time coming. The disparate views on single discussions was one of the uncanny things that killed the 2022 wave. That, quote posts, and people not groking the whole "the internet has more than 5 websites" thing, and the Masto devs have or are now taking action against all of those speed bumps.
Good on them for being responsive, I guess if not agile.
@niels Yeah, automatic retrieval isn't something one should currently expect from Mastodon. As julian mentions above, it doesn't currently proactively do anything to ensure completeness. It relies on the individual subscription relationships for that, and it doesn't work very well.
It currently makes the most sense to view ActivityPub as a technology that pulls in top-level posts into new social sites, for the users on that site to discuss amongst themselves (and the original poster), but this isn't what most users want it to be. People want, and seemingly expect, full discussion context. And so we see the discussions julian's involved in with other platform developers to land on some kind of standard way to extend ActivityPub for this stuff.
@niels said in Moving fediverse thread into forum: Handling replies:
> Any future replies are not federated, unless they @ a forum user og any forum user follows the person replying (and even then maybe not, Fedi is Mysterious)
@julian This one's kind of interesting, as different fedi services seem to work differently, and group-based ones usually do some work to keep comments flowing. But nodeBB doesn't seem to always play nice with that at the moment.
I found a Lemmy post via url search and then moved it into a category. I then followed the group actor for the community. Posts and comments seem to flow fine in /world:
But the post that was moved receives no updates to speak of:
Interestingly, it does keep showing up in /unread as new comments are posted to the post on Lemmy, even though those comments never land in the topic on my forum, suggesting that nodeBB knows about them, but may not know where to put them:
@eeeee Are time stamps sent with the post? Or created at arrival? If the latter, it's probably just that posts were sent to or processed by the Lemmy host in a different order than they were originally posted.
There's an inherent relativity of simlutaniaty issue with federation.
@julian Personally, I find the reply list -- and especially the new auto-quote back-references -- a more than sufficient solution, but then I don't think threaded discussions are a value-add to the bulletin board experience.
It's just not part of the expected UX, and kind of breaks the BB UX, which has always been built on the expectation of reverse-chronological posting. Not that I don't understand the utility, or someone having the preference. Threading is now ubiquitous on other social modals. It's become part of the design language of Web 2.0.
Some platforms that use threading now only load the first couple of levels of replies. I wonder if that's something that's currently possible via theme work, or if a plugin would be required, or even if work on core would be necessary. Or if some sort of popup modal that loads threads might be viable? Solutions that wouldn't require the threads to be pre-loaded.
@onlinepersona@programming.dev Following groups on other sites works well. The current default theme doesn't do visual threading, but reply relationships are maintained and linked. QuickReply kind of quietly discourages direct replies to comments, though, so I imagine many users - especially those new to the bulletin board experience - may end up replying to OPs, especially without a threaded UI.
I'm sure there's nothing stopping someone from making a threaded theme, though.