Hey guys, I’ll be back providing regular support to this plugin from now until at least March of next year. If you’ve been using this plugin and are struggling in some way, please let me know! I will respond to as many outstanding questions as I can.
Every user in Discourse is in an Actor. The following process in Discourse works the same as it does in Lemmy, and as detailed further in FEP-1b12. The reason you can’t follow Discourse Actors yet (i.e. that the primary focus has been on following categories) is because forums are inherently topic-centric, i.e. discussions that inherently involve multiple users. Indeed, this is the approach that has been taken by other forum-style ActivityPub applications, and is what we’ve been working on in the W3C Forum and Threaded Discussion task force (along with NodeBB and similar software).
What you’re describing is the difference between “First Post Only” and “Full Topic” federation. What you’re expecting is how “Full Topic” federation works. Please see the documentation and instructional videos on this here.
This error means that you’re not running an up-to-date version of Discourse. The ActivityPub plugin currently requires the latest version of Discourse to work.
No, the ActivityPub plugin complies fully with FEP-1b12, which was written by Nutomic (the creator of Lemmy) to describe Group-based federation. Have you tried to federate between Lemmy and Discourse?