Federation is an important element of digital sovereignty and is being baked into many open source tools these days. Even nextcloud, the file sharing and workplace platform we endorse and can help you set up on your self-hosted server, supports federation. This means you can use it to securely and privately use all of its workplace features to communicate and collaborate with people who are on a different Nextcloud server from your own.
For now, as I find my feet with federation, only topics tagged shared-to-socials can be followed. I also am only sharing the first post and am not yet replicating mastodon replies here. We’ll be able to see people who are following the tag.
Federation is easier to set up on your self-hosted discourse than you might think. You want to install the ActivityPub plugin created by Angus McLeod, from Pavilion. Angus has done some nice videos explaining how to install it, set up “actors” (tags or categories that can be followed or that can follow other federated sites) and then set up following.
There is a great deal more we can do here, such as effectively linking synchronizing discussions here with another Discourse site working on digital sovereignty and self-hosting with open source.
What do you think? How are you using federation? I’d love to hear ideas from others about how we might like to expand our use of federation to support and encourage digitally sovereign sharing and collaboration. There must also be other platforms that support ActivityPub and I’d love to hear about them.
I made an update! Now that I understand better how federation works, I enabled category actors for all public categories. This means that you can pick and choose the types of categories you want to follow. I kept the shared-to-socials tag for those who just want to follow the topics I curate selectively by adding the tag.
I changed the settings also to allow responses to be published here. We’ll see how that goes and if it generates too much unwanted content we can remove it. But I can see it being quite useful as a way of expanding the conversation to more likeminded people who are not (yet) signed up here.
Let me know if you have any questions at all about this or feedback.
I did notice a small bug which is that markdown syntax in posts that mastodon does not understand are just displayed in clear text. This is pretty ugly, especially when you want to share a topic that’s about an event like I did today. Posted to the Discourse meta community about it and hopefully Angus will find time to address it.
Well that was exciting - just realized today that federation silently stopped working a few weeks ago when I changed the domain for this Discourse site to digitallysovereign.org. There is no straightforward fix in ActivityPub Plugin - Plugin - Discourse Meta. And in any case, for followers the old domain is stored on mastodon (or whatever federated platform) so they will have to refollow the site anyway after this is fixed.
I deleted all activitypub plugin data and recreated the tag actor. I did not recreate the category actors for now. Tested it by following the tag actor myself and creating a new post tagged shared-to-socials, which worked.
Let me know if you have feedback on how federation is set up and if you want to have any more actors (eg categories) that you can follow - and then boost in mastodon!
For the intrepid, here's the fix
cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails -c
tables = [
"discourse_activity_pub_actors",
"discourse_activity_pub_follows",
"discourse_activity_pub_activities",
"discourse_activity_pub_attachments",
"discourse_activity_pub_authorizations",
"discourse_activity_pub_clients",
"discourse_activity_pub_collections",
"discourse_activity_pub_logs",
"discourse_activity_pub_objects"
]
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("TRUNCATE #{tables.join(', ')} CASCADE")
puts "All ActivityPub tables cleared!"
quit
There is a way to migrate your identity and your followers (but not your posts) from one Mastodon instance to another. I’ve done it once. Perhaps that process doesn’t cover this scenario. Did you try?
Not sure there is anything that could have been done - there is no mechanism in the activitypub plugin for changing domains and informing followers on mastodon of the new domain. If you have better info please do share.
Also in Discourse while it’s members who are posting it is not possible to follow them directly via federation - you just follow the categories and tags they are posting in. There is no mechanism for a member to migrate their identity from a given site to another one.
The jury is out on how useful it actually is to federate discussions on this Discourse with other Discourse sites or to mastodon or to whatever other federated platforms (what are they even?). I’m not entirely clear yet on the benefits over just sharing links directly on mastodon when we want to invite others to join a particularly interesting or relevant discussion.
I guess there still is a digital sovereignty aspect, because if the federated post sparks federated replies, at least the community gets to hold on to the discussion for posterity, find it later and refer back to it. But then again replies from mastodon will be shorter and off the cuff, and thus less deliberate and meaningful.
Another benefit is that you can follow and join in topics on a Discourse site without having to create an account on the site. That does feel very positive from the user perspective. It’s more privacy conscious and digitally sovereign to not have to do that. In Discourse you usually have to have an account and provide an email address to participate.
You can also have federated categories and tags between discourse sites. So if you are a member of one and don’t want to be a member of another, you can still have a joint conversation. I’ve always thought that would be an interesting solution for providing help with using Discourse! The Water Cooler > Site feedback category could be federated (perhaps enabled via a user friendly site setting) so people across communities can help one another figure out how to use Discourse and discuss how best to set up and run their communities.
