I wanted to see the current status of group actor support in #Mastodon.
This feature has been requested all the way back in 2016. It’s a feature request that is so old, it’s the 139th ticket. After it was made, @gargron stated shortly after:
I made a decision not to implement groups. They offer little benefit over a cost of added complexity, and the bangtag syntax personally irks me too.
A year later, he re-opened the feature request and said:
Reopening, but not high priority.
No further update since then. Nearly a decade after this feature had been requested, group support has not been added and it’s still not a high priority.
Now the intent of this post isn’t to wag my finger at Mastodon and say, “How dare they!” It’s clear that Mastodon is in a transitional state right now, and their focus is on other things – like quote posts and search.
But it is to say that the development of this feature is so completely out of Mastodon’s control that it now represents an opportunity loss for the platform. Because the truth is – whether or not Mastodon supports group actors – many Mastodon users are using it anyway even though this causes quite a few UI/UX problems along the way. Namely, the common Mastodon user cannot differentiate between a single user account and a group actor.
So now we have two groups of Mastodon users: those who want to make use of services like #Lemmy, #Piefed, #NodeBB, and those who are completely unaware of those services and ask, “Why the hell is Mastodon acting like this when I try to interact with that account?”
More to the point, group actors should be embraced because not only is this a valuable feature, but they’re also critical for community safety. No one can moderate a hashtag, but they can certainly moderate a Lemmy community.
Like I said, though, development of Mastodon is ongoing – whether Mastodon participates or not. And that specific element of the #Fediverse continues to grow, despite the fact that the most used Fediverse service (sans Threads) regards it as “low priority”. As long as Reddit and Facebook Groups users seek out an open, federated alternative, there will be demand for group actors.
Why am I saying all this? Because this is my plea for better interoperability. It is certainly within Mastodon’s right to be picky about what features they implement. However, the Fediverse would be plainly better if Mastodon finally supported this important ActivityPub standard.
@ajsadauskas @technology Don’t know if #PeerTube channels are group actors, but #Lemmy and #NodeBB forums are.
And if you want to know why I’m gung ho about this, take a look at this:
https://piefed.social/post/489174
I have big plans for this, and it’s going to be awesome!
NodeBB will be making an appearance at this year's FOSDEM!
I'll like be present at the Social Web dev room during FOSDEM itself, and will be presenting a talk at the Social Web After Hours event alongside @darius@friend.camp, @pfefferle@mastodon.social, and @j12t@j12t.social at Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL), on Sunday evening.
I'll be talking up the SWICG Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force, and what we're working on to solve one of fedi's hard problems: combating the notion that "the fediverse is quiet". Come and listen!
Thank you to the great folks at @ngizero@mastodon.xyz, who have kindly funded my way there this year.
@MiriShuli @alter_kaker @dyamalos it certainly has come to pass! Federated forums are now a thing with #nodebb
Anyone know of any #infosec / #cybersecurity / "hacker"-related #NodeBB instances I could try and plug into now that federation is possible? #askfedi
How long until @jerry stands up a NodeBB instance? (only kidding) https://community.nodebb.org/post/102756
Grow Your Forum Community: NodeBB Joins the Fediverse #Nodebb #Forum #Fediverse #Opensource #Decentralization
https://ostechnix.com/nodebb-joins-fediverse/
It might've taken us ten years, but we finally made it into TechCrunch — thanks @sarahp@mastodon.social for the great writeup!
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/21/forum-software-nodebb-joins-the-fediverse/
Next step, maybe they'll let someone write an article about us on Wikipedia.
#Groups are coming to #theFediverse:
"The most immediate change we can expect from this is convergence of many different kinds of platforms all aiming to support the same basic features…could lead towards a large part of the Fediverse moving beyond short-form microblogging.
Another interesting possibility here is that these nascent efforts might lead to some new applications, such leveraging #NodeBB or another piece of software as a replacement for Quora / StackExchange."
https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/nodebb-officially-joins-fediverse/