I really enjoy the federation feature very much, we move a lot of interesting fediverse threads into the forum and also have people from “outside” replying to threads.

Doing this, I’ve come across a UX issue (well, two) when moving in threads into the forum:

  1. I spot a thread somewhere in fedi that I want in the forum
  2. I paste the URL of a post from the thread into the nodeBB search bar
  3. I click “show results as topics”
  4. I find only that post and anything upthread from it
  5. I move that thread into the forum
  6. To get all the subthreads into the forum, I gather all the URLs of the leaves of the thread, search for them (as topics) and they federate in
  7. Any future replies are not federated, unless they @ a forum user og any forum user follows the person replying (and even then maybe not, Fedi is Mysterious)

I would like:

  1. A fetch-all-replies button to push after point 4) above, to get the whole thread from the original instance.
  2. An automated reply-fetcher polling for new replies in the original thread (w. exponential back-off etc.)

Maybe this already exists or is raised somewhere else? If so, feel free to move my post or just give me a reference.

Thanks for this really excellent piece of software :smile:

  • julian@community.nodebb.org
    1·
    3 days ago

    @niels @Kichae @eeeee what specifically you’re asking for here is a way to retrieve the entire conversation, all branches of it, for the full context.

    This is not something ActivityPub can do currently by design. However I am working with a number of separate implementors to establish something like this. You can see the progress of our efforts here:

    https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18647/the-state-of-conversational-contexts-february-2025

    This is already working in the wild. If you attempt to pull any post from NodeBB, you will get the entire topic, including remote replies.

    Mastodon is separately working on something called “reply tree traversal”, which is something that will also work but is an approach I feel is fraught with reliability issues.

    • niels@community.nodebb.orgOP
      0·
      2 days ago

      @julian Great to see you working on it! My primary use case would be reading from Mastodon, any level of automatic retrieval would be an improvement.

      I can see why you’re excited about the new federation features, but whoa did you create a lot of work for yourself 😆

      • Kichae@community.nodebb.org
        0·
        2 days ago

        @niels Yeah, automatic retrieval isn’t something one should currently expect from Mastodon. As julian mentions above, it doesn’t currently proactively do anything to ensure completeness. It relies on the individual subscription relationships for that, and it doesn’t work very well.

        It currently makes the most sense to view ActivityPub as a technology that pulls in top-level posts into new social sites, for the users on that site to discuss amongst themselves (and the original poster), but this isn’t what most users want it to be. People want, and seemingly expect, full discussion context. And so we see the discussions julian’s involved in with other platform developers to land on some kind of standard way to extend ActivityPub for this stuff.

        • julian@community.nodebb.org
          0·
          2 days ago

          @Kichae @niels fwiw latest Mastodon just merged a PR that enables reply collection fetching. It’s behind a feature flag and I’m guessing they’re testing it out.

          I’ll likely write a little blurb about it and our approach this week

          • Kichae@community.nodebb.org
            1·
            2 days ago

            @julian Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. The disparate views on single discussions was one of the uncanny things that killed the 2022 wave. That, quote posts, and people not groking the whole “the internet has more than 5 websites” thing, and the Masto devs have or are now taking action against all of those speed bumps.

            Good on them for being responsive, I guess if not agile.