On the one hand, FediGroups is kind of lacking from a Hubzilla/(streams) POV. Forums on Hubzilla and (streams) can be made fully private, i.e. nobody from outside the forum can even read them. Not possible on FediGroups because not possible on Mastodon, not to mention that it'd be somewhat inconvenient without server-side OpenWebAuth support.

Also, it's not only possible for Hubzilla and (streams) users to post to Hubzilla and (streams) forums without also posting to their own connections, it's standard. Hubzilla and (streams) forums only forward posts to their connections that come in as direct messages. This does not apply to comments, only to posts.

The same thing is impossible with FediGroups because it rejects direct messages outright.

On the other hand, both features make Hubzilla and (streams) forums harder to use for Mastodon users as they want to use everything in the Fediverse as if it's all Mastodon. Even if a forum is configured to be read by any logged-in user, Hubzilla and (streams) don't recognise logged-in Mastodon users because Mastodon still doesn't have client-side OpenWebAuth support either.

And the very reason why Hubzilla and (streams) forums are being perceived as incompatible with Mastodon is because it's too inconvenient for Mastodon users to start threads on them. I'm not even sure if this has been tested because there's no documentation on this.

Either Mastodon users have to send a DM to the forum which is completely unnatural to Mastodon users who are used to @-mentioning everything unless it's actually private. Or they actually have to mention Hubzilla and (streams) forums with @!, the Hubzilla/(streams) prefix for DMs, which is completely unknown and completely alien to Mastodon, not to mention completely unsupported.

That said, there are even more shortcomings from a Hubzilla/(streams) POV.

It's impossible to make threads with titles because Mastodon doesn't support titles on Note objects. By the way, this might hit the Friendica crowd hard: FediGroups won't work with posts from Friendica with titles because these go out as Article objects (like blog posts) instead of Note objects (like Mastodon toots), and I'm not sure how FediGroups will handle Article objects.

Generally, it seems a crazy idea to build groups on top of something that not only doesn't have a concept of groups, but that doesn't have a concept of conversations either. But then again, at least two thirds of the Fediverse don't have a concept of conversations. Users of these two thirds can only follow threads if everyone in that thread keeps mentioning them in every last post. At least on Hubzilla and (streams), this is completely unnecessary.

Moderation will be unnecessarily difficult because Mastodon also doesn't have a concept of permissions beyond Mute and Block, and because all replies to posts are posts themselves and exclusively owned by whoever posts them and thus can't be moderated by the thread starter.

Also, FediGroups are so far the only "groups" in the Fediverse that don't present themselves as Group actors. Thus, they're the only ones which Hubzilla and (streams) don't list as forums. Even Guppe groups are listed as forums on Hubzilla and probably also on (streams). This can only change if FediGroups actually soft-forks Mastodon and at least adds Group actor identification, no matter how much of Mastodon's code will have to be changed for that.

I'll be honest: I hope that when the redesign of conversations on (streams) goes stable, it'll become a good base for Fediverse-wide forums, even for Mastodon users who think the Fediverse is only Mastodon and for notoriously stubborn Misskey plus Forkeys.

@Various Fediverse features

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Groups #Forums #FediGroups