Add support for following regular users

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

The way category actors behave and how they relay a forum user’s post is well-known, and there isn’t anything resembling a bug in that. However, I would like ideas on how this situation would be handled in a real environment with real Mastodon users. Discourse’s way of transferring topics has caused confusion several times now. I’ve received inquiries about why their follow request hasn’t been accepted.

Normally, in Mastodon, boosting or resharing appears like this.

A real user shares another real user’s message with their own followers. They then usually decide whether to follow the user who made the shared post. There’s no need to follow the one who did the boosting because they are already being followed.

But the topic relayed by Discourse appears like this.

Then others try to follow the one who appears as the author, in this case @Jagster@foorumi.katiska.eu, which is my forum user, and cannot be followed. If they try, it appears as pending approval, as if the user had locked their account they can nowadays, but it doesn’t send anything. The actor they should follow is the forum category actor @it-web@foorumi.katiska.eu — but it isn’t followed because generally, no one ever follows the booster since they are not the original publisher.

I would now like some thoughts and ideas on how on earth we can explain this difference to Mastodon users. I think I understand the basics of why the implementation is like that, but still, we are in a situation where Mastodon users keep trying to follow the wrong actor.

I keep talking about Mastodon because Mastodon seems to be the only one in the ActivityPub-fediverse capable of communicating with Discourse — and “only” in the sense that my fediverse is limited to just Mastodon and Friendica, as well as Pixelfed and Bookwyrm, both of which generally limit what they accept.

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I wasn’t quite sure where to put this because community didn’t seem appropriate, and this isn’t really a support topic either.

And yes, this is AI translation, if I trigger now some triage thingy. Normally I don’t care about bad grammatics and Finnish-style sentences, but this was too long text to struggle with on Sunday morning

Edit

I forgot totally. When my Mastodon user, who is following Discourse category actor, boosts a Discourse topic, it will be shown like this:

The confusion will be even worse because not the booster is my Mastodon user, and original writer is my Discourse user — who can’t be followed. The category actor, who should be followed, is totally vanished now.

Edit2

Now I’m totally lost I have a test user in Mastodon and it could follow my… how should we call it… my federated forum user, here @Jagster@foorumi.katiska.eu. That has changed at some point? But it seems that this forum user doesn’t send anything, because the category actor does it. So following a user instead category is pointless.

[kuba-orlik]

@Jagster

I would now like some thoughts and ideas on how on earth we can explain this difference to Mastodon users. I think I understand the basics of why the implementation is like that, but still, we are in a situation where Mastodon users keep trying to follow the wrong actor.

I think the best, ideal solution I would wish for would be to give us a way to follow the regular forum users, as well. Lack of this possibility is really cooling my enthusiasm for federating my Discourse instance, as the confusion of “hey the follows are not working” is scary

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

I’ve changed this into a Feature request, so please vote for it if this is something you want.

[pmusaraj (Penar Musaraj)]

Yeah, I see the confusion here. It is complicated because we are mixing forum conventions with social media conventions.

In the short run, I think we can try and steer users more towards the category/tag actors. Not sure how far we can take it, but maybe there is a way to reflect that in this user’s profile somehow?

I don’t know how much flexibility the protocol gives us here, but if there was a way to block follows here but outline that the user has posted in actors A, B, C, it might help.