I am an entrepreneur, small business owner, author, and researcher. I am also working on an open source project called Neuhub.
I am posting from Hubzilla with Neuhub via ActivityPub.
For those on traditional social media, I just say “What if Facebook and Twitter and YouTube could all talk to each other? People on Facebook could follow people on Twitter and people on Twitter can follow people on Facebook.” Then they usually reply “that would be neat” and then I tell them “yeah, that’s what we are building over here in the fediverse.”
It usually is easier to give them an analogy related to something they are familiar with.
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One thing that you have to consider is that some forums and categories might have post permissions attached to them. For example, many Hubzilla forums restrict creating new posts to members of the forum. (To become a member of a forum, you would need to connect to or follow the forum, and then be allowed to join by the administrator, either automatically or by admin approval.) In that case, not everyone can create a new top level post. There may also be comment restrictions as well, regarding who can comment on a post in the forum.
If you were to cross post between multiple forums or categories, if you want them to be synced, you would have to take into account the relevant permissions, and decide what to do with posts that don’t conform.
One option is for the admin of a forum to allow which other forums they allow a full sync (ignoring existing forum permissions and providing an exception for other trusted forums). If a cross-posted post comes from a non-trusted forum, then no exceptions will be allowed and the existing forum permissions are enforced.
Of course, nothing has to be done about this and we can just let the forums enforce their own permissions. But if we don’t communicate these permissions, some users might not realize why their cross-post has been silently dropped since the UI does not make it clear that a user had to be a member of certain forums to post to that forum.
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To create something like this, you would need to federate two components, and optionally a third.
You would also need to create a standard (a protocol) for the app store to talk to the websites hosting the applications.
Application Hosting: Basically, everyone can create their own website with their own apps. That part would be unmoderated, similar to how you can go to a software publisher’s website today and download a Windows program. They publish their application and data about their apps in a machine readable way where an app store could take that data and create a listing.
The App Store: There would be open source app store code that allows people to run their own app store. The people operating an app store decide what gets listed in the app store. Some app stores will be for a particular niche while some will attempt to list everything. For example, you might have app stores that only have open source software. This would still make the app store operator the gatekeeper, but what is different here is that anyone could use the same software and set up their own app store.
Curation Groups: This allows people or groups to create their own curated list of approved apps. This provides the app stores a shortcut so they don’t have to review every single app themselves. This would allow individuals, communities, associations, and even businesses to create moderated lists of apps they reviewed and believe should be listed in app stores. Mastodon could publish a curated list of Mastodon Apps they recommend. Open source organizations could create a curated list of apps they recommend. The app stores could consume such lists.
People can then choose the app store and the apps they trust. App stores can choose the curated lists they trust.
This is similar to how podcasting platforms work, where a podcaster publishes their audio files and an RSS feed with information about their Podcast, and various Podcast Directories list their podcast. Or similar to how platforms like Steam work, where they list games, many of which can be obtained on the game author’s website as well. The key point being that the authors of the apps can get listed in multiple app stores.
Optionally, both the Application Hosting software and App Store can be integrated with protocols like ActivityPub, AT Protocol, or Nomad/Zot protocol for the purpose of sending out notifications to followers who may be interested in updates and news about the apps or the app store. At the very least, it should list an existing fediverse handle where people can follow them.
So, yes, it can be federated.
To be safe and secure, you would want multiple organizations with resources to run competing app stores using this software and protocol. These organizations can be non-profits, cooperatives, or even small businesses. The reason why is because an organization is more likely to have the resources to moderate the list of apps in their App Store, whereas an individual most likely would not, unless that was their full time job.
Whereas anyone who created an app could run their own website with information about their app, and then request to be listed in various app stores and curated lists.
I think this a great idea!
@julian @Mario Vavti That is one thing that I wish Hubzilla did, and that is identify the author of the original note (top level post in a forum), both internally in the database and in a variable available to themes, and externally via Zot protocol and ActivityPub.
@julian I saw a NodeBB test on Hubzilla Monster. I’m guessing that was you.
In order for you to properly mention someone, the Hubzilla server needs to know about that actor first. The easiest way to achieve this is to follow (connect to) that actor. This adds the actor to the database. This only needs to be done if no one on the server is following them or being followed by them.
This does create an extra step if the actor is unknown to the server, but it does force spammers to follow unknown actors before they can mention them.
#[1](https://community.nodebb.org/inbox) delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden 2025-03-30 22:51:57
#[2](https://community.nodebb.org/inbox) delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden 2025-03-30 23:28:55
By the way, we also have a test forum set up here: @Neuhub Test Forum
#[1](https://neuhub.org/channel/testforum)
@julian I just tried posting five different posts from Hubzilla to @Testing Ground via various methods, and none are showing up.
I am not sure if that forum is moderated, but none of my posts are showing up.
But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you’re able to change addressing based on where you create the post.
Yes, in Hubzilla, we can click on the padlock and select who the post is addressed to, including NodeBB forums. I haven’t tried it yet, but Hubzilla does recognize NodeBB categories as “forums.”
@julian I’m not sure. They changed things in the last major version when they adopted FEP 171b Conversation Containers.
Some examples of forum channels are @Hubzilla Support Forum and @Neuhub Support Forum.
@julian How do you deal with situations where the group actor also sends posts?
For example, on Hubzilla, (streams), and Forte, the top level post of a forum thread is from the forum, not the user. This was originally done for Mastodon compatibility since it did not understand threaded conversations and groups. They could follow the forum as if it were a user, and receive all of the forum posts. They could send a DM to the forum to create a new post.
NodeBB took a different approach, using boosts to distribute user posts to people who follow the forum. And I think you said you use mentions within a post to create a new top level post.
How are we handling the differences in approaches?
Since they are federated out to other platforms, each platform decides how to use them. Some platforms will use your hashtags to categorize similar posts, sometimes making post searchable by hashtag. But the exact functionality depends on the platform that received the post.
Why is it so expensive to federate Bluesky?
Mostly because it depends on certain centralized services. You can create your own apps and even host your own content, but the discovery and distribution system has a copy of every post so that it is easy to access by everyone. The positive side is that you don’t have to worry about missing replies in the conversation since their centralized database has a copy of it. The downside is that hosting such a massive database is expensive.
You also have to consider that some servers are very politically-oriented, and if your political beliefs are not aligned with the administrator or community, then you are likely to get banned or if not banned, made to feel unwelcome. This applies to the left, right, up, or down on the Nolan chart. It is their right to do so, since it is their server, but the result is usually echo chambers that repeat the same talking points. If you like to debate policy, then these are not the communities for you.
If you want to discuss different points of view, you need to find a community that actually wants to debate the issues. Or run your own server and find like-minded friends to talk with.
We never know what the future holds. But one of our goals is to decentralize social media. If we wind up with only a few major players, we have failed in that goal.
True. But when talking to someone who lives on traditional social media, it is an explanation they would understand. Sometimes you have to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.