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Microsoft DevBlogs now federated
(devblogs.microsoft.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Windows Development
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If you actually go to the account description of @msftdevblogs@dotnet.social, it says it's an unofficial parrot bot of Microsoft dev blogs. Title seems misleading.
That's because Microsoft isn't officially in the Fediverse (yet), and this is a project Maho - who is a Microsoft employee - did in his spare time. There's also a note there about where to give feedback if you'd like Microsoft to officially have a Fediverse presence.
I'm not sure if Maho is on here himself, but Nick Cosentino - another Microsoft employee, and the 2nd person to follow the bot - is, and I'm sure he'd be happy to clear up anything. :-)
That makes sense, but doesn't explain at all why did you post a title you clearly know is untrue.
But it is true. In what way do you think it's not true? You can demonstrably follow it from anywhere in the Fediverse - what more do you want?
The blog does not talk to Lemmy instances, nor Lemmy instances talk to the blog. The blog does not implement ActivityPub. Lemmy comments of the articles do not show up on the blog. You can follow the bot, and it definitely makes the content available, but it doesn't fit most people's understanding of "federated". Twitter doesn't federate with Mastodon, even if there are bots that copy Twitter content onto Mastodon.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great initiative. But I think calling it federation is misleading.
Does anything? I'm genuinely asking. I know how to follow other accounts from Mastodon or Pixelfed - I don't think there's any way to follow another account from my Lemmy account? As far as I'm aware that functionality doesn't exist in the first place anywhere, but happy to be told otherwise.
It does - I can follow it from Mastodon (or Pixelfed, or...). It's using the Wordpress ActivityPub plug-in (doesn't support Lemmy, but as per my previous comment I'm not sure that anything does).
Look at where my account is from in this comment
It's also possible to ping Mastodon users to bring them into Lemmy discussions. @msftdevblogs
Yes, you can use Lemmy from Mastodon. Read my comment again - you can't use Mastodon from Lemmy... unless you can tell me where in Lemmy I can click on and follow Mastodon accounts? That's why, in the Wordpress screenshot, Lemmy isn't supported - no-one has a Lemmy feed for the posts to appear in. All the supported services have a timeline feed for the post to appear in. Lemmy doesn't.
You can't follow Lemmy users on Lemmy either. I actually think the Lemmy developers are planning on improving how Lemmy federates with other services, but they just have other stuff to focus on and aren't as well funded as Mastodon.
However, you can follow Lemmy users on Mastodon. It's also possible to follow Mastodon groups on Lemmy
Yes correct, which was my point to the other person. They claimed that the MS blog isn't federated because it doesn't offer full functionality in Lemmy, but it's Lemmy itself which isn't offering the full functionality in the first place - there's no such thing as following a blog in Lemmy - so it's just a strawman. All the services which support following a blog are able to follow the MS blog, therefore federated with all those services (which doesn't include Lemmy).
I think it just seems disingenuous. Microsoft "federating" AI generated articles and fragmenting the comments leading to ActivityPub looking like a mess when in reality Lemmy and Mastodon and other services do interoperate in ways that are expected.
Maybe a better question for federation would be "can users interact with eachother?"
It's not Microsoft doing anything - this was something a Microsoft employee did in his spare time so that we can follow the blogs from the Fediverse, which is a good thing. :-) He further encouraged people to give feedback if they'd like to see Microsoft officially have a Fediverse presence (via the Feedback link on the blogs home page).
I think I'm just kind of being somewhat extreme about it too. I mean, like, Microsoft has had support forums in the past. (I think even some that have been removed, etc) Lots of stuff like this moved to reddit, but I could see it possibly being successful with federation today.
(There were reasons it failed, like, bad UI, miserable account control, differences in how answers were displayed, etc)
Exactly! That's why I started the MAUI Community here. We used to have a thriving and vibrant Xamarin forum, then Microsoft shut it down and started what was supposed to be a new, more general one on one of their own domains, but all it achieved was it killed the community that we had. So Lemmy is quite similar to a forum (just lacks the ability to have a sub-topics hierarchy like the Xamarin forum had), so here I am trying to re-establish the Xamarin (now MAUI) community that we used to have. :-)
It also doesn't post back to Microsoft's dev blogs. As an example, the Mastodon blog post doesn't contain the comments from Microsoft's post. I wouldn't consider it federation until this is true.
...because Microsoft has public commenting switched off in the first place anyway. Some blogs are read-only and that's fine - I can still get them in my Fediverse feed anyway. One less separate site I have to visit to get my tech news - that's the power of ActivityPub. 😁
The example linked has comments.
It also just seems very spam-like to me. Like 6 months ago, there were communities with lots of bot posts doing really low quality post mirroring for hacker news, some subs, etc. For some types of content, it does not work, as the content is a discussion. It's just not very productive to see a link post to a question and then have seperation in answers because something isn't properly federated.
Oh yes! You're right. I didn't see them before - needed to scroll further (was expecting to see them higher up). I was wondering why people were complaining that you couldn't comment when you couldn't comment anyway. 😂
Yeah, Microsoft requires you to login to comment - with MS account I guess? There's one reason to give feedback to MS to join officially. :-)