Invidious: Feature request: integrete comments with the fediverse using ActivityPub

Created on 11 Dec 2018 · 5Comments · Source: iv-org/invidious

Basically, it would be great to be able to leave a comment on a video displayed on Invidio.us using my fediverse account (GNU social, Mastodon, Pleroma etc), and have then appear in my fediverse timeline, as I can with videos on PeerTube instances. To make this work, invidio.us would need at least some support for the ActivityPub standard.

enhancement stale

Source

strypey

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Most helpful comment

@its3ch0

Well, I'm not sure exactly how federation would work without federating video content.

I was imagining something similar to the WordPress plug-ins like Pterotype. WP blogs with that plug-in enabled, allow a user to comment using their fediverse ID, and the comment appears both as a normal WP comment (subject to whatever moderation the blogger applies), and also on the user's fediverse timeline. In this case, I imagine the comment appearing under the video when it's accessed on invidio.us, not being added to YT.

Another way it could work is that YT channels could be published as feeds. So for example a Mastodon user could follow a YT channel. Videos posted to that channel would appear as a post in their timeline, from a user with the name of that channel (or the name of the YT user who runs it?). The post would contain the video title and a link (and maybe a thumbnail?). Clicking on the link would take them to the invidio.us page for that video. They could then go back and comment on the video by replying to the post. This is roughly how it works with PeerTube, although the long-term goal is to allow videos to be watched as embeds (including fullscreen mode) without leaving the micro-blogging client.

What we could do is disable this feature if the video owner has comments off.

You could, but isn't the main reason people turn comments off on a YT video because they expect toxic comments, and they don't want to have them associated with their video on YT, nor to have to moderate them? There's currently nothing stopping YT videos being discussed in the fediverse. What harm would be done by making it possible to associate these discussions with the video as it appears on invidio.us?

That'll be the server pushing out a lot of content and receiving a lot of content.

That's a valid concern. Would it be possible to develop the feature on a trial basis, and see what sort of load it adds?

What we could add on to this, for people who don't have an account on the fediverse, is that people with an Invidious account could comment on videos, and it'll appear there too.

That's a great idea!

Here's a couple more resources on implementing ActivityPub:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/
https://github.com/dret/activitypub/blob/master/implementation.md

strypey on 3 Jan 2019

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All 5 comments

There is a crystal version of pub relay
https://source.joinmastodon.org/mastodon/pub-relay

proyb6 on 11 Dec 2018

Thanks for your comment @its3ch0.

Me, as a content creator, may not want my content federated to other platforms.

No matter what solution we come up with, we're still exposing a very large userbase of content to discussion on a different platform, without their permission.

I don't think I understand your concern here. The proposed feature does not appear to federate any video content. My understanding is that this would provide an alternate form of discussion, which is viewer-generated. It's understandable if you're concerned about having discussion elsewhere, but there are already multiple forums that provide that.

there's quite a lot of issues that may come with this, the first one being how complicated it is

I don't know enough about ActivityPub to say either way. I was waiting to comment until after I'd read through the spec. Maybe @proyb6 or @strypey could go into more detail on what functionality Invidious would need to implement?

omarroth on 21 Dec 2018

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