These days I have seed and flavorful vegetables on my mind. I'm grateful to be part of an international community with that passion. One of the places on the internet I learn the most these days is a #Discourse #forum dedicated to that topic and I wish it could federate with Mastodon and similar networks, so the conversations could take place here too. Atm you need a 500$ business plan to integrate #ActivityPub plugin.
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@malte I gather that $500 plan is the upgrade at the particular hosting provider or Discourse itself. The alternative would be to self-host Discourse or check if there are other providers that have the plugin enabled in a cheaper plan.
@smallcircles You're right that is at Discourse itself. The reason why the forum is there is because Discourse has a generous policy of offering up hosting a forum on normal "pro" terms for free if you're running open source organisation (GTS is open source seed community). For an organisation like that, the jump to a business plan is a long jump. My dissatisfaction is more that ActivityPub integration seems to be such a heavy plugin, literally costly in hosting terms. I wonder why.
@malte I don't have figures at hand, but various good articles have been written over time that addressed the fact that ActivityPub protocol itself and how it is implemented on the fediverse leads to these high requirements. It is likely not due to Discourse plugin being particular inefficient. Though I am not sure how actively the plugin is being developed. It was tested for a time on the SocialHub developer community forum, and much of the functionality was still a bit rough around the edges.
@smallcircles I wonder if anyone has done a comparison of how heavy it is with #NodeBB or similar forum fedi structures. Maybe @julian knows.
Re: These days I have seed and flavorful vegetables on my mind.
@malte@radikal.social not yet, but supporting ActivityPub scales exponentially relative to supporting an actual user on the forum. The activities coming in for that one user take about as much processing power as a local user using a forum, but compound exponentially when you include boosts, other responses, backfills, etc.
It all adds up a lot, and it's hard to keep under control.
Possibly more since the AP code isn't terribly optimized at the moment.
@julian On that note, do you have any recent text on the possible or planned futures for NodeBB or forum media as a whole on federated networks? I'm curious to know
Re: These days I have seed and flavorful vegetables on my mind.
@malte@radikal.social yes, I'm actively working on 4.9.0 and there will be a blog post about it soon!
As for future planning, I can put something together as well 馃檪
Re: These days I have seed and flavorful vegetables on my mind.
@malte@radikal.social 馃槺 what!!
Hopefully our free ActivityPub plugin native integration will help change some minds 
Thanks for sharing!