Some of you may know there’s a movement on the internet away from the closed social media platforms and into a more open internet where people can talk to each other from across different apps, sites etc. Some examples are Mastodon (micro-blogging), Pixelfed (image blogging), Write.as and Ghost.io (Newsletter and long-format writing), Bookwyrm (Book reviews) etc. All of these technologies can communicate with each other, so you can read and follow from one place instead of having to log into 40 different chat apps every day, as people increasingly do. For example, I have gotten rid of Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, LinkedIn, Slack, etc etc by having one single chat-app that gets through their walls and makes me keep the connections to my friends who are still in there. The big tech platforms are a hassle, but the open internet is amazing.
Why am I writing this here? Because I want to know if this forum could become part of the open federation too.
Practically, when posting an update on your adaptation project or making an interesting comment about some gardening practice, other people who follow you (or even just a certain topic) can get a notification about it and read it. It would pull more gardeners and breeders into the conversation over time.
Discourse has a plugin for ActivityPub, which is the protocol that runs these open federations. Unless you’re self-hosting, you need the enterprise hosting plans: ActivityPub | Discourse - Civilized Discussion. But maybe our host makes exceptions for non-profit organisations like GTS?
I’m really interested in this whole thing, especially as we are building the crop guides and people have requested specific emails during the season. Do you have any examples you can share, or even better host a zoom where you can show us?
As far as the Enterprise plan, as a NPO we get 50% off any of the plans, we are paying $50/month now. 50% off the Enterprise plan is still probably more than we can afford.
Thank you for clarifying that. My assumption is that the ActivityPub integration is still so early in development that it has to be tailored to each Discourse forum. That’s why they’re limiting it to Enterprise plans. I would guess that as development progresses, it will eventually become more available to more or even all Discourse forums. So with time, it might be easier, I’m just eager to let this movement for openness and federation grow. I think it is also possible that Discourse would make exceptions for ActivityPub integrations for NPOs if they’re interested to be part of this new development without switching to an Enterprise plan.
Do you have any examples you can share, or even better host a zoom where you can show us?
The Discourse meta forum is itself an example of a place that has federation running. For example, I can follow the category announcements - Discourse Meta on Mastodon. And then on that forum, you can see who follows that category (and from where they do that).
I would like to see more examples in the wild and the possibilities for how to use, but this is close to the limits of my own understanding right now. I could show some of the basic ways to use federating technologies (like the ones I mentioned above, which I use myself), but don’t know much more about ActivityPub integration for Discourse specifically. Super exciting to think about the potentials though!
I check it when you commented last time in another thread. It is very interesting with a lot of potential. My worry’s are more about user acceptance in this demographic. So if they got problems with creating an account in discord, understanding this concept will be very hard.
In the other hand the cost of the server of chat will be on the part of going to seed wallet. So my recommendation is to go with an external service and not be part of the forum.