tootik communities

I've been working on support for 'communities' in tootik.

https://github.com/dimkr/tootik

tootik is currently more like Mastodon, it's based on the idea of users that follow specific users and see a feed of activities by these followed users.

Unlike Mastodon, tootik has some special handling for special "Group" users, like Lemmy or kbin communities: when you view the profile of such a user, tootik displays threads and sorts threads by last activity, instead of displaying all posts (including replies) and sorting everything by publishing time. Then, you can select a thread to view its replies, and they're sorted chronologically.

However, tootik doesn't have groups of its own, a forum-like thing where people can discuss a topic. It only tries to display them in a way that makes them easy to navigate and interact with.

I'm currently working on adding support for "communities" in tootik, and I'm not sure if the current implemnetation is intuitive enough and makes sense:

The instance admin creates communities

The community is a new kind of user: it has a profile page that displays posts the same way as Lemmy groups, you can follow the community

If you mention a community you follow in a new *public* post, the community shares this post and all other followers of the group receive it

If somebody who follows the community replies in a thread (replies to a post, replies to a reply to a post, ...) of this community - same thing, the community shares the reply with all other followers

Posts shared by the community appear in your feed, just like posts shared by normal users you follow

Basically, the community is a bot that shares posts that mention it, and their replies.

Correct me if I'm wrong: this is pretty much how Mastodon users interact with Lemmy groups, but with the advantage of more convenient thread-based view of the community. What would you change in this design? What can I improve?

Posted in: s/Fediverse

😈 dimkr

Apr 29 · 3 weeks ago · 👍 norayr

3 Comments ↓

🐙 norayr · May 01 at 00:07:

thank you for all amazing work you do.

i am not qualified to feedback, but i have this question.

you also deigned guppe groups, right? that's more like a mailing list on activity pub. there, it is also necessary to mention a group so that group members receive the message.

does it differ from communities and how?

😈 dimkr [OP] · May 01 at 08:31:

@norayr Nope, I didn't know guppe but now I do thanks to you. From what I see, groups work the same way in all forum-like or aggregator-like fedi things: it's always this 'follow to join' and 'mention to post' pattern. tootik communities should work the same way as in guppe, minus one thing: the communities are created manually (by the instance admin) and not auto-created every time you mention a non-existing community. Otherwise, a malicious actor can create a community (mention a non-existing one), join with many spam accounts and send many posts, forcing this tootik instance to send them to all spam accounts.

🐙 norayr · May 01 at 23:12:

understandable and perfectly reasonable.