Arnold Schrijver@aschrijver@socialhub.activitypub.rocks

Roadmap for the official Discourse ActivityPub plugin?

In another thread @tobiaseigen wrote:

Meet the First Sovereign Tech Standards Cohort | Sovereign Tech Agency

I’ve been disconcerted lately to find that the Discourse team appears to be putting the activityhub plugin on the backburner.

There are quite a few issues and rough edges. It would be good to know more about future plans, if there are any. There may be people interested to work on furthering federation of Discourse in some form or other. See below. I created this thread on SocialHub, so it federates out to Discourse Meta and the broader fediverse.

https://catodon.rocks/notes/ao86ar70skzr074b

SocialHubMeet the First Sovereign Tech Standards Cohort | Sovereign Tech AgencyAwesome! Congrats. I’ve been following the Sovereign Tech Agency and considered applying for a job there, but am not able to completely move to Berlin at the moment. Look forward to keeping an eye on your progress and if there is any way I can help will be happy to do so. Since leaving Discourse.org in December I’ve been very focused on digital sovereignty , including setting up a new community at digitallysovereign.org (using discourse, ftw!) where I am exploring providing practical guidance a...
silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social

Replying to @⁨panos@catodon.rocks⁩

@panos What do you mean by proper group federation?

In my experience, group federation works well in Discourse. Most of the bugs that we identified during the test drive at SocialHub have been fixed.

I can name only one major issue that still remains, incorrect timestamps in old threads: https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/487

Discourse MetaActivityPub PluginHi, I’m trying to report an issue with the AP plugin regarding the published datetime being incorrect on posts that are manually “published” via the “Publish all posts” button. Example https://browser.pub/https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/object/a8d6c23e6c428313efb9bf20efeb020c Expected behavior published indicates the datetime the post was originally published, i.e. the datetime visible locally in Discourse (2018). Actual behavior published indicates the date the AP resource was created...
Edited ⁨⁨Jul⁩ ⁨31⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨16:21⁩⁩
panos :catodon:@panos@catodon.rocks

Replying to @⁨panos@catodon.rocks⁩

Found some time earlier than expected, so here are the basic differences of my fork:

- It makes each federated category/tag behave much more like a real Lemmy community (Group actor), including its moderators, featured posts, follower rules, and shared inbox.
- A Discourse topic can be sent as a Lemmy-compatible Page (with replies as Notes), rather than only the formats upstream offers.
- Votes federate: remote upvotes/downvotes become Discourse likes, and the federated score is shown on posts.
- Moderation federates in both directions: removals, bans, locks, moderator changes, reports, and featured/pinned posts can be communicated to compatible remote communities.
- Discourse users become proper, followable ActivityPub people. Mentions are also resolved for federation.
- It can follow a remote community—for example on Lemmy or NodeBB—and present it inside Discourse as a local “shadow category.” Local users can then read and participate from Discourse.
- It adds an instance-level actor and optional “authorized fetch,” which can require signed ActivityPub requests when other servers retrieve content.
- Administrators get extra tools: community/federation health view, remote-community management, per-community ban management, URL/content resolution, and bulk republishing/backfill.