I had the opportunity to work with the team at OpenBeta on the re-launching of their community forums. They’re one of our earliest v4 testers, since they’ve agreed to have ActivityPub enabled!

(Okay, more realistically I dragged them into it kicking and screaming, but they did provide the opportunity for the forum relaunch, so I’m taking the opportunities as they come!)

During the prep, I discussed some of the well-trodden concept of the fediverse to my co-admin, Ben (bean@community.openbeta.io and also bean@uvix.cc)… stuff I’m sure you’ve come across:

• Fragmented nature of conversations
• The idea of an instance
• Content discovery with respect to the follow-relationship model

… and wouldn’t you know it, it’s really hard to discuss these ideas, and Ben is actually fairly well-versed! He ran his own Iceshrimp instance, so all of this wasn’t exactly new to him.

Part of it was that I had been steeped in the ActivityPub dev scene for almost a year, so it’s hard to step back and explain to mere mortals laymen non-developers what exactly all this ActivityPub nonsense is.

All I know it gets me thinking that I need to work with andypiper@macaw.social on documentation!

That new NodeBB instance, by the way, is https://community.openbeta.io/ :)