James Cridland
@evan I’ve always wondered what this means.
My website “federates” - by posting new content automatically to the fediverse from @Podnews . Is that what you mean?
Or is the suggestion that HN removes all its web comment infrastructure and replaces it with comments sourced from ActivityPub?
What would you mean here - and what would you do?
Evan Prodromou
@james @Podnews This is a really interesting question! There's not an easy answer to it, but I have some heuristics that might be useful.
Evan Prodromou
I think there may be a few informal "levels" of federation.
1. Publishing - users on your platform have profiles visible to the Fediverse (username@yourplatform.example). Other users on the Fediverse can follow your users remotely. When users on your platform make or do something, notifications and content are sent to their followers.
Evan Prodromou
2. Monitoring feedback - users on your platform can see likes, shares, and comments from users on the Fediverse. They can reply to, like, and share comments from users on the Fediverse.
Evan Prodromou
3. Reading - users on your platform can follow remote users on other platforms. When those remote users do or make things, your users are notified.
Evan Prodromou
4. Being part of the conversation - users on your platform can like, share, or comment on content created by remote users and delivered to your platform. They can see likes, shares, and comments on the content from other users on your platform or remote users.
Evan Prodromou
@james @Podnews That said, there's also a level of publishing ActivityPub objects that aren't actors. https://places.pub/ is an example of this, but I think there are probably other data services that could be useful here.
Evan Prodromou
@james @Podnews Anyways, I think Hacker News would probably be good if remote users can like, comment, and reply -- level 2, here. That would kind of meet the needs of a publishing system with a lot of participation. But I think it would be *great* if they could follow remote actors and join in remote threadiverse discussions (level 4). That would be a real hacker community platform.
Evan Prodromou
@james @Podnews I don't think any of that means ripping out their existing systems -- just augmenting them with support for remote users.
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