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Our fediverse conversations are gonna have the context they have been missing! (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 3 weeks ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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This past June, I put together a write-up about two major approaches to backfilling conversations. The ability to properly backfill conversations means we will be able to make major inroads toward solving the feeling that the fediverse is quiet.

I, alongside several other members of the SWICG Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (ForumWG) have been working toward building implementor support for Conversational Contexts — the ability to explicitly classify a set of objects as belonging to a conversation, whether that be a topic, reply tree, or similar.

I am happy to report that we have made some wonderful inroads this past few months!

jesseplusplus@mastodon.social has been working closely with the Mastodon team to allow software to backfill from Mastodon — this pull request has now been approved!

I have been working with both nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social to allow software to backfill from Lemmy and Piefed, respectively. (Lemmy PR, Piefed issue)

This marks a major milestone in the adoption of conversational contexts. With Mastodon on board backfill will be possible with the majority of the microblogiverse. With Lemmy and Piefed on board, backfill will be possible with the majority of the threadiverse.

Remember that pfefferle@mastodon.social was an early adopter of conversational contexts, and we have been able to backfill from WordPress blogs for quite awhile now (so that's the blogiverse too)

I for one, am eagerly awaiting the next version of all of these softwares!!

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[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 weeks ago

I don't use mastodon, but is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 18 points 3 weeks ago

It may still be missing stuff from before the first person from your home instance joined the community which can make younger communities feel empty.

[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 10 points 3 weeks ago

Ah ok. That's the problem that the major instances solved by having bots auto join all new communities in each other, right?

[-] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Yup, this removes that need.

Edited to add: and more BTW, including addressing brief network outages messing with sync and other issues, depending on the server type/activitypub implementation.

[-] FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 4 points 3 weeks ago

yep. https://lemmy-federate.com/ lets you do this.

[-] julian@activitypub.space 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

> is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

You're not wrong about that. Threadiverse software (Lemmy, Piefed, and NodeBB too) use something called 1b12 to synchronize content between instances.

If you follow a community, you set up the synchronization from your server to that community from that point forwards.

This is similar, but not quite backfill, which is what happens if you follow a community mid-way and don't have any of that stuff from before.

Also you can't 1b12 synchronize with Mastodon, so that unfortunately is a dead-end, but you would hopefully be able to backfill from Mastodon.

[-] wakest@piefed.social 4 points 3 weeks ago

everything is weaved together! What happenes when a mastodon account responds to a piefed account and then that gets shared by a Friendica account etc.

[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

I have no idea :)

[-] wakest@piefed.social 5 points 3 weeks ago

My point is that there is never a hard line between any other parts of the fediverse so if there is a new feature or way one part does something it will always have an effect on the other parts.