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.

 

[Kevin]

Come on, XF, it's time to embrace ActivityPub....

WordPress blogs can now be followed in the fediverse, including Mastodon | TechCrunch

In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse -- the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon

techcrunch.com

ActivityPub

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.

wordpress.org

 

[Bulbagarden]

Something like Wordpress's ActivityPub plugin would be amazing. For those of us who use article posts to create news forums and portals, making it possible for our users in the Fediverse (and Threads, when it eventually adds ActivityPub support) to directly follow us would make things a whole lot simpler.

 

[zethon]

I wrote this plugin for vBulletin back in 2010: https://github.com/zethon/vbnetwork

At one point had 4-5 boards on my network. I was ahead of time.

I've often thought of bringing something like this back for XenForo but I'm not sure how much interest there would be unless it had some other Fediverse support.

 

[sub_ubi]

I wrote this plugin for vBulletin back in 2010: https://github.com/zethon/vbnetwork

At one point had 4-5 boards on my network. I was ahead of time.

I've often thought of bringing something like this back for XenForo but I'm not sure how much interest there would be unless it had some other Fediverse support.

That's awesome!

 

[MaximilianKohler]

Found this on Lemmy:

Just to let you guys know, we just merged the PR that allows a Discourse category to follow any actor in the fediverse, including other Discourse categories. Yes, that means you can now federate a category between two (or three, or more) Discourses. There’s a few more PRs in the pipeline as part of this phase, but that was a big one.
Here’s a video me federating across two Discourse instances and a Mastodon instance running on my computer

https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117

 

[sub_ubi]

Found this on Lemmy:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117

This is perfect. I really want to get in on the ground floor, but I don't want to use discourse

 

[MaximilianKohler]

Yep. I would love it if people on lemmy and mastodon (and now discourse) could subscribe to, and post to my forum with their fediverse accounts, from the fediverse instances they're using. And if my forum posts would show up on lemmy and mastodon feeds.

 

[TPerry]

t looks like Community Hive might be just what the doctor ordered?

Coming up on 6 months later and that "offering" is sucking hind teat. I'm still getting "email notifications" on an account that has been removed and cannot be initialized again.... nice in theory, but implementation sucks.

 

[MaximilianKohler]

More and more people are seeing the fediverse as the future:

Why publishers are preparing to federate their sites

The Verge and 404 Media are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement.

digiday.com

 

[MaximilianKohler]

New Lemmy update:

2024-06-07 - Lemmy Release v0.19.4 - Image Proxying and Federation improvements

join-lemmy.org

Lemmy can now federate with Wordpress, Discourse and NodeBB.

In order to improve interoperability with Mastodon and other microblogging platforms, Lemmy now automatically includes a hashtag with new posts. The hashtag is based on the community name, so posts to /c/lemmy will automatically have the hashtag #lemmy. This makes Lemmy posts much easier to discover.

On a side note, I was thinking that "upvotes on Lemmy" could be translated to "likes" on forum posts if the forum has voting disabled. Downvotes could be ignored (lemmy instances can disable downvotes too).

Also, I think fediverse integration would make things more difficult with the current moderation tools/system that Xenforo has, and it would likely need some significant changes & upgrades. IE: I've created a few threads about issues I've already come across: https://xenforo.com/community/searc...tent]=thread&c[users]=MaximilianKohler&o=date, and mentioned that the Red*** moderation system with the Mod Toolbox addon seems superior.

Another one I thought of is the fact that I manually approve all new account registrations to prevent spammers & bots. This works well for me now, but it seems like it would be problematic/impossible with federation. This is my current process and it seems like it could be automated via detection of VPN/proxy + temp email: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/andrew-moderator-panel.187755/page-40#post-1683765

 

[sub_ubi]

to deal with spammers and bots, de-federate from servers that can't keep their users straight.

 

[MaximilianKohler]

to deal with spammers and bots, de-federate from servers that can't keep their users straight.

Yeah, I guess I could leave the manual approval for people specifically registering on my forum, and that would be separate from the general allowance of fediverse users to post with their fediverse accounts.


Oh, and I'm not sure how other forums plan to do it, but I was thinking that you could associate forums/subforums with certain topics, tags, or even specific lemmy/mastodon communities to post to when you make a forum post.

For example, I have a subforum on my XF forum about general health news. If I make a post on that subforum it could automatically post to Mastodon with the #health hashtag, and all /c/health lemmy communities. Or I could set it to only post to one specific /c/health lemmy community. The latter would probably be better since it's less spammy.

Also, cross-posting would need to be taken into account. Perhaps a checkbox for "submit to lemmy", and maybe some automated URL checks, since what's being submitted on the forum might already be on the lemmy community.