Federation support for Discourse

[rishabh]

@hellekin

There’s a related topic at ActivityPub Implementation for Discourse that should be reopened for interested people since nothing is sure yet about how this will play.

Before we can re-open that topic, I think the community should decide on functional spec here that someone could get started with.

As the term “ActivityPub Implementation for Discourse” is extremely broad, the team strongly believes that we should keep this simple and start small.

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@Falco had an interesting proposal on these lines, any thoughts?

@Falco

Proposal

My proposal for ActivityPub & Discourse is basically having a way to recreate the Facebook feed using the Feediverse + Discourses (multiple).

A basic Facebook feed is composed of:

1. My friends posting stuff to their wall
2. A bunch of randoms posting to my groups

Today Mastodon (or any other OStatus/ActivivityPub microblogging platform) can only do 1. You know what does 2 very well? !

So my proposal was to allow users to add a bunch of ActivityPub feeds from Discourses they use, like me for example:

• Meta
• PiHole
• Age of Empires Forums
• Overwatch Forums

and have (latest or top) posts interleaved in their social feed at mastodon.

Check out this high res mockup:

If we would add posts or topics, how to deal with length and context is an exercise to the reader.