65
Introducing Threadirator - A Threadiverse Community Federator (federation.quokk.au)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This is a service to help communities propagate to other instances and help with discovery of communities. So far tested and working with PieFed & Lemmy Instances - I suspect it should work with Mbin, but need to test it (Any Mbin Instance volunteers?)

Anyone is free to add their community to the list, but only admins can add their instance to receive communities.

This tool is designed to be simple to use, not requiring fiddling with your instances DNS unlike Lemmy-Federate. Verification for authority to register your instance is done via a message that checks to see if the person confirming is an admin account. It also back-propagates, so on joining your instance will subscribe to all previously added rather than only new ones going forward.

This is my first time launching a service like this, and as such it may not work flawlessly - please share any feedback or suggestions.

https://federation.quokk.au/

all 19 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 10 points 4 months ago (1 child)

Boosted to help visibility, even if a little.

Also, there's Friendica and NodeBB among the "threadiverse", though the latter I'm not very familiar with so Idk if it allows importing communities.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Friendica and NodeBB

    And Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte. All from the same family. Although there has yet to be someone to start a group on Forte.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
    • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    Creator of Lemmy Federate here (not the main maintainer anymore, handed over to lemmy.world management). The reason I switched to DNS-based authentication is that not all software has messaging capabilities.

    For example, WordPress doesn't have messaging. Guppe uses a different messaging infrastructure based on Mastodon. Custom hobby software doesn't have it either (blogs like chrastecky.dev). I'm not sure about messaging capabilities of NodeBB and Friendica but DNS-based authentication makes Lemmy Federate support all types of federated software that implements FEP-1b12: group federation.

    For example, although Lemmy Federate currently doesn't have any code specifically for Piefed, it does have Piefed support and 10 instances are already registered.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 3 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    Oh wow I didn’t know Lemmy-Federate shared WordPress blogs and other software. That’s really cool. How does that look like on Lemmy? Is the community the blogs name or something?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
    • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It could use a bit more explanation on what I'm registering for in the signup. Am I signing up for your instance? Do you need credentials for a bot account on my instance? If so, what exactly will it be doing?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks, I'll work on that part tonight.

    Basically you're signing up your instance (adding a bot or generic user account that will be used to subscribe to the comms shared), and you add your admin username (no other information) so that it can be verified that an instance admin is the one initiating this procedure.

    The bot credentials are so that it can subscribe to communities shared on Threadirator and help them federate to other instances, as discovery of new communities is not automatic requiring at least one account on an instance to manually visit/join it before it will start appearing in feeds.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    That makes sense to me then. My worry as a tiny instance owner, is that I'm worried I'll get flooded with requests, that's a lot of traffic I'd be signing up for. Larger DBs, more ingress, any thoughts on that?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 6 points 4 months ago

    More communities could mean an increase in traffic, but realistically I feel 90% of Threadiverse communities get 2-3 posts before dying off. Very few remain active or grow big enough to see any impact on performance.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Very cool project!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 months ago

    Thanks Blaze - would love it if you could recommend it to any instance admins you know. The more instances who participate the better discoverability for new communities to grow.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Whoaa cool!!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •
    [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Very cool project and MULTIVERSE is subscribed to it. Hoping to see some cool new communities!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •
    [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    @Quokka@quokk.au the site died? Can't load from my side.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
    • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Other than DNS login, how does this differ from lemmy federate?

    My number one concern is that now there are two services providing what appears to be the same service, some instances will use one of them, some will use another. That could harm community discovery unless we sign up to both.

    Is there, for example, better piefed support?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago

    Signing up for both causes no harm and provides redundancy.

    This one offers adding communities through the Threadiverse via messaging the bot. Meaning it can be used completely independently of ever visiting the site straight from your app of choice.

    It also has a PieFed plugin (thanks to the wonder @wjs018@piefed.social) in the works that will auto add new comms on any instance running the plugin to the database. Just waiting for a hook to be merged into a future PF update before that can be finalised.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent