I found this article from earlier this year: https://blog.discourse.org/2025/04/discourse-and-the-fediverse/
However, I haven’t come across that much content from Discourse platforms over here on Lemmy/Piefed. Is there more work to do with the plugins, or should we work with organizations running Discourse to help them connect with us?
For example, the threadiverse communities for OpenStreetMaps is relatively small, and being able to see / contribute to community.openstreetmap.org would be amazing.
Discourse decided to do its thread context in a way that’s currently incompatible with projects like Mbin or Lemmy. Those expect threads to be represented by some kind of post (Page, Article, Image, etc objects), while Discourse decided to use an OrderedCollection, with the first item being the opening post.
Even if Lemmy decided to add support for OrderedCollection threads, there’s another issue though: the barrier for initial federation is too high. Discourse only gives you the fediverse handle of its categories, but to federate them in, you need their JSON-LD URL, not the handle. And Discourse decided to use separate URLs for its HTML and JSON-LD pages, with no way to derive the latter from the former. So to initiate federation with a Discourse category, you have to manually do a WebFInger query to get its URL to then give it to your instance. I think most people probably fail this hurdle, either out of laziness or lack of know-how.
Also, I don’t know about Lemmy, but the Mbin instance I’m using seems incapable of processing Discourse categories anyway. Not sure why that is.
That means Lemmy is entirely reliant on Discourse users replying to posts that are visible to Lemmy, similar to Lemmy-Mastodon interaction. But with less users, hence less overall interaction frequency.
Hey! Thanks for the concise reply. There’s a lot of technical stuff I can say about Discourse and such, but because I am the maintainer for NodeBB it is probably in my best interest to keep my mouth shut as we directly compete!
Anyhow, the
OrderedCollectionstuff is actually all from me. I’ve been working as part of the Threadiverse working group to bring intercompatible formats to all threadiverse software, which besides Discourse and NodeBB, includes Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin.The
OrderedCollectionenables software (like NodeBB) to quickly backfill entire topics. This is a huge problem on the microblog-side of the fediverse, and is not really a problem on the theadiverse, since there is already strong support for synchronization. However, smaller instances often do run into issues where they can’t ever “catch up” on old posts because there’s no way to get those posts. (e.g. start following a new community, you can’t read any of the old content)To that end, Lemmy and Piefed have (or soon will) ship code to allow software to backfill using
OrderedCollections. They don’t use them yet, but they will provide them. It helps software like mine because I will then be able to see entire threads from communities I don’t even know about or follow. It’s a huge boost to discovery! :smile:> while Discourse decided to use an OrderedCollection, with the first item being the opening post.
NodeBB also does this, but they’re not incompatible per se. You’ll see NodeBB topics showing up just fine on Lemmy and Piefed (see [email protected] or general), and that’s because NodeBB does the extra step of announcing OP and replies, just like Lemmy/Piefed.
Importantly, Discourse does this too, but because of the inability to find Discourse categories, I don’t think it’s easy to follow them. Chicken and egg, really. The way the AP integration in Discourse is built-out, it is more insular by design. Threads from Discourse only ever go out to the fediverse, you can’t post in from the fediverse. That makes those communities much more insular by design and severely limits discovery.
Thank you for the detailed explanation, that makes sense :)
@otters_raft I suggested on a few forums that I belong to that using the plugin might be useful and federating content would be a good idea - What I got back was fairly negative feedback - e.g people thought it would cause people who don’t have accounts on the relevant forum being able to spam the forum and get around repuation requirements (not true I understand) - but also a kind of - query why federation would be useful - with an assumption people would just come to the forums and monitor them directly.
This is an important thing to consider, and why NodeBB decided to even pursue federation at all.
It’s arguable that we’ve reached the point at which forums cannot organically grow due to the ubiquity of social media. Depending on who you ask, we’ve reached that point 10+ years ago already.
It’s becoming increasing imperative that forums federate or risk dying due to attrition. Forums used to be the social network for niche topics. Facebook (with Groups) and Twitter (with hashtags) started competing, and Reddit (with subreddits) made another huge dent.
There are some communities that fear integrating with AP will cause their local communities to become flooded with just anybody. Those fears are unjustified, but understandable.
@julian Yeah I definately didn’t think their concerns weren’t valid - I wasn’t sure that I could clearly demonstrate benefits / address concerns. (and they were technical forums) - Don’t get me started with my desire to include a link to a fediverse post in any comment I make in Reddit
As far as I can see, you can ask questions and follow categories if the admin sets this up. Here is an example: [email protected]
You can only post if you connect your Fediverse account to the forum.
Do you see any content on that page? I’m looking at [email protected] but I don’t see anything except the title and icon
I can’t say anything about calling handles with !, but if I follow the handle on Mastodon, it works anyway.
Right, that makes sense
What I’m getting from the comments here is that it works for microblogging, not for forum / threadiverse
So I can find the forum and subscribe to it if I want.
I did try subscribing to one from my instance a while back, but no content has federated in since then
Of course, I can’t say anything about other forums.
Nodebb is the forum that federates
Heckin’ yeah it is. :sunglasses:
Discourse does too.
TIL!
First of all it’s opt in so they have to enable it. Second it’s currently broken federating with lemmy. I think they developed it with mastodon in mind. I’ve already reported how it doesn’t federate properly to them last year
I don’t see Discourse on https://fedidb.com/software
It does federate for sure but implementation looks quirky.
From a few(3) places that I have asked, It’s either they can’t due to enterprise hosting requirement on discourse servers or they don’t want to due to controversy (CSAM).
