Bring Xenforo to the Fediverse

[sub_ubi]

There seem to be two ways people are federating forums. I'd be happy with either one really, or a different method you dream up. I just like federation.

1) The singular timeline. Users "subscribe" to various forums: neogaf, ign, stevehoffman, the forum you run, et. al., and then popular threads appear in their fediverse timeline. This replicates the experience of joining facebook groups or reddit subs, where interesting threads from followed communities are pushed to the user. An example with activitypub.

2) Community-owners pick and choose forums from other communities to display alongside their own. The founder of Lemmy made an adorable demo of the idea,



This looks like a regular forum index except one of the forums, "lemmyBB", is not local. It exists on an entirely different community with different users, yet both local and foreign users can post within that forum. Imagine adding stevehoffman's "audio hardware" forum to your tech community, or realcavsfans adding a forum from kingsfans for some healthy NBA debate.

 

[Wing]

Very interesting idea… I can see this genuinely driving better content engagement to forums with the new generation of users

 

[skicomau]

Am watching ActivityPub progress with much interest. Feels like it could be a real sleeper of a standard with strong deep currents that end up driving innovation in surprising places.

 

[Paul B]

Who/what controls, updates, maintains, configures, programs, and pays for the central server?

Isn't this just tapatalk (spits) on steroids?

 

[sub_ubi]

It's a W3C standard protocol, so there is no central server. It's already heavily used and being built into newer social media like Threads.

ActivityPub - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[skicomau]

Who/what controls, updates, maintains, configures, programs, and pays for the central server?

Isn't this just tapatalk (spits) on steroids?

Meta's Threads team adopted it with the rollout of Threads. Which is a serious vote of confidence for the standard.

I suspect that incorporating ActivityPub was as much about getting in front of satisfying EU requirements for user account control/portability and to also mitigate anti-trust complications back home. But whatever the motivations the solution chosen was ActivityPub and it's a strong signal that 'Web3' (whatever that means to you) is a thing that the global platforms are taking seriously.

Either way, would recommend getting across it and keeping an eye on it's adoption.

 

[Wing]

Yeah, looks promising and could breath new life into the forum community

 

[Wildcat Media]

It's a W3C standard protocol, so there is no central server. It's already heavily used and being built into newer social media like Threads.

ActivityPub - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I like the idea. It would be nice to be able to collab with other, similar forums and get some interest across all of them.

I've even thought of creating a social network of sorts via Mastodon for a couple of niche interests. Many of our users are older and distrust social media run by major corporations.

 

[grant_]

I believe this would be a great addition to one of the largest forum softwares, just like others have said, would breathe new life into forum usage

 

[MaximilianKohler]

Nice! I was just about to post about this!!

Federation – a way for forums to fight back against the social media giants?

People use sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc., because they're free and easy, but a large part of it is also the network effect -- that's where most people are so that's where you have to go. I've seen discussions about forums dying out due to the growth of these behemoths.

Recently, Reddit s**t their bed and people have been moving to Lemmy - a loose federation of reddit-like websites. https://lemmyverse.net

It was mentioned that it's possible to federate forums. 'Existing forum software could implement activitypub and link with lemmy.'

I think if all the developers of the main forum software (and even owners of forums) worked together on a federation project it would benefit everyone.

Forums have lots of benefits over Reddit/Lemmy-like sites, but the main benefit of Reddit/Lemmy is exposure and community growth. If forums could be federated, then it would solve this issue and they'd be the best choice (again) for many people.


ActivityPub:

ActivityPub is the "tech"/message passing protocol behind Mastodon, Lemmy, and PeerTube.

nostr:

"Nostr is a better protocol than ActivityPub."

Lists issues with Twitter and Mastodon: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr


EDIT:
I think it's not enough to simply "feature other forums on your own forum" as was suggested in a previous comment. People go to a specific site like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and search it, or they search "reddit query" on Google. I think the forum fediverse needs a "front page" like that that can be searched.

Also, I think Reddit greatly benefits on search results by being a single site with high domain ranking. Federating forums on a bunch of different sites still wouldn't solve the search ranking issue right?

 

[sub_ubi]

Any SEO issue with federation is ultimately a Google/MS problem, and I believe they're motivated to find a solution. MS already runs at least one mastodon server, and neither company seems fond of the current big social networks.

The phpbb front-end for Lemmy is here, though development has been paused ever since ~60k users flooded in from reddit. I don't believe it's working any longer, but it was neat while it lasted.

Discourse funded a third party ActivityPub plugin, which can be found here. It's pretty bare bones at the moment but development is rapid.

 

[FTL]

@Web Diva this might interest you.

 

[Suzanne O]

Looks a bit too much like tapatalk because they do the same thing.

Tapatalk - Free Forum Hosting, Free Forum Mobile App.

Tapatalk the world's leading mobile platform for building great communities online

www.tapatalk.com

 

[Max Taxable]

Huh?

 

[MaximilianKohler]

Huh?

Are you new to the term/notion of federation? Here is some introductory info:

• https://fedi.tips/
• https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-the-fediverse-and-can-it-decentralize-the-web/

 

[Mr Lucky]

Are you new to the term/notion of federation? Here is some introductory info:

• https://fedi.tips/
• https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-the-fediverse-and-can-it-decentralize-the-web/

I could understand very little of either of those. It did look like the second one was against copyright protection, possibly condoning copyright theft.

Someone needs to explain all of this in plain English.

 

[80sDude]

I could understand very little of either of those. It did look like the second one was against copyright protection, possibly condoning copyright theft.

Someone needs to explain all of this in plain English.

I think it’s like a Facebook of forums. I’m not sure what to make of it though. Invision just released something similar to this.

 

[MaximilianKohler]

I could understand very little of either of those. It did look like the second one was against copyright protection, possibly condoning copyright theft.

Someone needs to explain all of this in plain English.

Think of Twitter, how a single person (Elon Musk) is in charge of the whole thing. If he makes changes to Twitter that you don't like you're pretty much screwed; you have no other options.

Mastodon is a federated version of Twitter. What this means is there is no single person/entity controlling it Mastodon. Anyone can set up their own server on a domain of their choice, and interact with all the other Mastodon servers/websites/instances. Each server has its own rules.

ActivityPub and nostr are the protocols working behind the scenes to connect all these different servers/sites.

Lemmy is the equivalent of Mastodon for Reddit. Here you can see all the federated lemmy instances/websites/servers: https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_day. The largest instance -- https://old.lemmy.world is not listed there due to a temporary bug.

https://lemm.ee/ and https://lemmy.sdf.org/ for example, are two Lemmy "instances". They are different websites/servers hosted by different people, but they can each interact with any other website/instance on the fediverse.

You could do the same thing with https://xenforo.com/community/ and https://www.overclock.net/.

These are all open-source projects as well, meaning that anyone can contribute to their development. An example of this is that many people don't like the default UI of Lemmy, so an "old.reddit" UI was created and can be added to anyone's server, Eg: https://lemmy.world vs https://old.lemmy.world. And someone even made one that looks like a phpBB forum https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB.

I've been thinking that a "fediverse" tab at the top of a forum may be one way to integrate forums with federation. IE: any Xenforo forum could choose to opt-in and add a "fediverse" tab here:


And that would enable people to browse other forums from any federated forum.

 

[Mr Lucky]

If he makes changes to Twitter that you don't like you're pretty much screwed; you have no other options.

That's fine by me. He owns it so he has the right do what he wants.

That's the way I feel about my forum, although I generally do ask the members about changes that effect them and I think (hopefully) I listen to them more than Elon Musk does.

I'm still not understanding what a Fediverse is after reading about it.

 

[TPerry]

If he makes changes to Twitter that you don't like you're pretty much screwed; you have no other options.

Incorrect assumption.. there are other alternatives out there... but not all of them are "joined at the waist".

What this means is there is no single person/entity controlling it Mastodon.

Again... incorrect... or are you stating that if you run Mastodon, you MUST participate in the "pie in the sky"verse?
Basically... all it is, in a nutshell, is a rebadging of SSO with some "tweaks".

but they can each interact with any other website/instance on the fediverse.

And that can be done now with API calls... just that most admins still don't really want to "share" their hard earned traffic with leeches.... which is basically what is being proposed.