Discourse has an activitypub plugin that enebles interoperability with other forums like lemmy, piefed, mastodon or other activitypub enabled discourse forums.
It would help in lowering the barrier for entry as it wouldn’t be necessary to make yet another account on this site.
It would also help promote open robotics project in open source circles that hang around the fediverse.
Oooh, interesting, thanks for pointing this out!
Any idea of what the login workflow looks like? I think relaying posts to Mastadon would be useful, as well as re-using account credentials, but I have concerns about automatically allowing people to login to Discourse without a little bit of friction / confirmation.
Unfortunately as we use official hosting from Civilized Discourse our plugins selection is limited. You can see the list here:
If it became one of the defaults we could certainly consider enabling it but until then it’d moderately academic how it might work.
Unfortunately as we use official hosting from Civilized Discourse
I assumed that it would be available, as this is on custom domain and it wouldn’t be hosted on Civilized Discourse.
Any idea of what the login workflow looks like? I think relaying posts to Mastadon would be useful, as well as re-using account credentials, but I have concerns about automatically allowing people to login to Discourse without a little bit of friction / confirmation.
There is still friction to log in, but it’s made differently as fediverse has different architecture. When creating an account, users are asked to solve a captcha or answer some form of custom prompt that is looked over by the administrator of the fediverse server.
A user would create an account on activitypub enabled server (e.g. https://programming.dev) and would subscribe to the local forum (e.g. https://programming.dev/c/robotics) or remote forum (e.g. https://lemmy.ml/c/linux or hopefully https://discourse.openrobotics.org/c/ros/ros-general/) They would be able to leave comments and posts in all those forums. If they would misbehave they could be banned from specific forum, server or whole network. If for some reason there would be a rouge server that would send spam or illegel content, it can be added to denylist (defederation) so there would be no more communication with that server. There are a few denylists that are community curated.
Similarly, discourse users would be able to post and leave comments on other forums (e.g. https://programming.dev/c/robotics)