What would cross-posting between instances look like in ActivityPub?
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Following up on this question I asked back in late March, I wanted to continue thinking about how one would handle cross-posting between categories/communities, given that there isn't current consensus on it, and especially given that NodeBB—as of v4.3.0—can now see and browse remote categories.
From that original topic, we can distil the following:
- Both PieFed and Mbin do not natively handle cross-posts, a new entity is made with the crucial bits (link, text, possibly title) copied over and changed if needed, sometimes a "cross-posted from..." helper text is prepended.
- There are legitimate concerns that a cross-post might not succeed depending on privilege settings on the receiving end, so a pre-flight check (or explicit rejection) of some kind might be required.
- Cross-posting can be done by the original author, or another user.
So were an FEP to be written, we'd center it around the following assumptions:
- "A user (which may or may not be the object author) is sharing an object to additional audiences"
- We would use the existing
Announce(Object)model - We would not use
Announce(Activity)because it is not the original object creation that is being announced, but the object itself, to a new audience. - Some form of
Rejecthandling would be required for cases where the cross-post is not allowed - How the receiver handles the activity is out-of-scope of the FEP. It could be that the original object is contained within multiple categories/communities, or a duplicate object could be created — implementor's choice.
This is very similar to an existing announce/boost/reshare, except that instead of addressing the activity to followers list you are addressing it to a group actor's inbox.
Some additional questions:
- Is there desire from PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin for supporting incoming (and possibly outgoing) federation of cross-posting?
- What exactly happens currently if a Group actor receives an
Announce(Object)? My guess is nothing, currently, but let me know otherwise
- Would this allow you to accept cross-posts from other AP applications without needing to refactor any existing code?
- Duplicating the object would mean the discussion is split between objects. The ideal implementation would be the same object present in multiple categories/communities. Is there desire for this in the threadiverse?
@rimu@piefed.social @andrew_s@piefed.social @melroy@kbin.melroy.org @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de @nutomic@lemmy.ml @angusmcleod@mastodon.social
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As far as I am aware Lemmy doesn't have cross-posts like you are imagining.
There are two parts to this:
- There is an indicator if there is other post that links to the same website/image.
- Crosshposts are just a copy of the text with quote markdown.
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@julian
It is great to see NodeBB trying to work with other platforms to solve issues.It is supposed to be a federated network, cross-posting is important for many fedi users.
also, if platforms intergrated better it would help discovery and help new and old users of fedi.
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As far as I am aware Lemmy doesn't have cross-posts like you are imagining.
There are two parts to this:
- There is an indicator if there is other post that links to the same website/image.
- Crosshposts are just a copy of the text with quote markdown.
@ludrol@szmer.info yes, you're right about that. The silver lining here is that we're at a point where the major players' implementations are local-only, so we don't have to work around with a pre-existing implementation and ensure compatibility.
The second point is that a "cross-post" could have multiple meanings, including manually creating a new post about a link already present in multiple communities. What I'm hoping to describe is a common way that items can be cross-posted natively between instances, while hopefully preserving their reply-trees.
