Clarification, backwards support to status-update instances (aka Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey etc)

[guysoft]

Hey,
Just to confirm, I want to have an instance that both implements both Community Federation and that can interact with the already Mastodon, Pleroma and Misskey instances.

Would theses roughly translate:
Person -> Forum
Status -> Topic
A list of Persons -> Community
?

[cpmoser]

@guysoft yes on the first one, a Forum is effectively a multi person Person with permissions for specific users to post to the forum's outbox (or delete or edit messages).

As far a Topic it's not a status, I would consider it the subject matter of what's being talked about. Maybe there's a better word to describe because I know that Topic can be a forum's equivalent to Status. We could introduce something like Post (equal to Status) or Thread which would be a post and a collection of replies.

Community I would define as more ephemeral, I think it's a good word to describe the larger federation model of sharing the topic (subject matter) of something. It would represent all of the connections between forum instances which could be very broad and far reaching.

So what I would propose maybe is a terminology change, something like this:
Person -> Forum
Status -> Post, and Thread to represent the post + replies

Topic would be something new, I would see it as a conduit for forum instances (and potentially individual users too) to share content based on content.

[guysoft]

Not sure I fully understand. Ill try and implement something and ask for input when its doing something "

[cpmoser]

I should probably create a diagram for this, that would probably help.

[guysoft]

Ok, I tested setting Forum instead of Person on Pleroma and it does see the profile correctly.

[guysoft]

Implemented here: https://github.com/guysoft/fedigroup

[guysoft]

Got stuck, thought I might update here that it made me open this issue:
mastodon/mastodon#18741

[guysoft]

Hey,
so good news, I managed to get Mastodon and Pleroma to show up user profiles.

One of the things that got me stuck was that Mastodon will not show up "Forum" actor types, but will show Person in searches:

This works:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "https://w3id.org/security/v1"
  ],
  "id": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/group/aaa2",
  "inbox": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/inbox",
  "preferredUsername": "aaa2",
  "publicKey": {
    "id": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/group/aaa2#main-key",
    "owner": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/group/aaa2",
    "publicKeyPem": "BOOP"
  },
  "type": "Person"
}

This does not:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "https://w3id.org/security/v1"
  ],
  "id": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/group/aaa2",
  "inbox": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/inbox",
  "preferredUsername": "aaa2",
  "publicKey": {
    "id": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/group/aaa2#main-key",
    "owner": "https://pleroma.gnethomelinux.com/group/aaa2",
    "publicKeyPem": "BOOP"
  },
  "type": "Forum"
}