Excited for NIME! As a keen mastodon user, I’m wondering if the NIME account will be used this edition?
Alternatively there’s a great discourse activitypub plugin that could allow categories on this forum to be accessed via mastodon etc. It works well in my experience, and would mean that announcements wouldn’t need posting in two places.
Hi @yaxu, sorry I didn’t pick this up early – a lot going on as you might imagine! In principle I think it would be lovely to activate this, though I’m not sticking my hand up to run it during the conference.
Anyone attending NIME who might be interested to volunteer to do some live commentary on the NIME Mastodon?
Hey @yaxu & @andrew , I am on Mastodon, I could offer to “retoot” a selection of posts with certain hashtags (e.g. #NIME26 or something like that) on the NIME account a couple of times a day if that helps. The discourse activitypub plugin also looks like a very nice idea IMO. Not sure who would have to install it though, perhaps @charlesmartin knows?
ok we have the discourse activity pub plugin now - as a starting point, I’ve added a fediverse actor for the announcements category, you should be able to find it as @announcementsannouncements@forum.nime.org on your server/service of choice.
If anyone happens to post in announcements, then their user also g@usernamets an actor @username@forum.nime.org (but only their posts in a federated category are federated).
@federicovisi - if you would like to play with this functionality more – then great! – it is super useful to have community posts about what happens during the conference, not just for hyping it up in the moment (which is certainly fun) but also to establish a permanent trace of how conferences unfolded.
Great Charles, thanks for setting it up. How would you recommend doing this then? We post in announcements, the posts get federated in a new @username@forum.nime.org profile, and then if we want these to be on our existing Mastodon profiles we would have to repost them? Is that how you see it? What about the @NIME@mastodon.online account?
Oh thanks a lot for this!
I managed to subscribe to @announcements@forum.nime.org (rather than @announcementsannouncements@forum.nime.org, I’m guessing that was a typo?)
Yes, this seems to be working nicely, thanks @charlesmartin ! One thing: since Announcements is supposed to be a “low-volume category for important announcements” wouldn’t it make sense to create a new dedicated category like “Social posts” or similar, where people can post more casually (e.g. quotes from a presentation or keynote, photos from a concert or demo etc.)?
(sorry for the delay, was on planes… )
yep totally agree, the announcement feed was basically an initial experiment to work out what might be useful. I was just brainstorming some category names:
I think “amplify” might be a good category name, it sort of encapsulates what will happen if you post in there. What do you think @federicovisi ?
This will mainly work if we try to put content in there, I’ll write a clear category description and I’ll try to post in there regularly during NIME next week but good to get your help and others recruited to just post some cool stuff.
Perhaps rather than create a category, there could just be a single thread for NIME 2026 conference chat? With every post to the thread federated as a separate message.
I feel like it’s best to use the forum as intended, just accessible via the fediverse, rather than treating it like a mastodon client?
By the way I just tried replying to the recent announcement from my mastodon account and it worked (as did deleting the post again).
@charlesmartin @yaxu ok, so then the idea would be to start a NIME2026 thread (under which category? “Conference”?) and then mirror that thread in the fediverse? That sounds good to me, shall we start from there?
was just a learning a bit about the activitypub plugin. I don’t see that any of these options are unnatural for discourse, it’s just how externally visible certain posts are.
I actually have now turned off federating replies on the announcements channel (which is the suggested config for an announcements category).
I’ve created a category “Amplify” which is denoted for socially amplified/shared posts about anything NIME related. Posts and replies there are federated.
I’m a bit hesitant to federate the conference category. Many of the posts in conference are actually support requests for things about attending NIME (e.g.) or authoring submissions. I don’t think the authors would necessarily expect the posts to show up on social feeds.
Discourse can also federate tags, so I could setup a “seen-at-nime” tag for discussions which for a thread or discussion during the conference which will end up federated from any category.
edit: follow up, I’ve enabled tags and federated seen-at-nime so if you make a post with that tag, the post and all replies are visible at @seen-at-nime@forum.nime.org
Happy to give it a go, but I find amplify a bit of an unclear name. I thought about posting something but then thought it would be better to post in a more specific category (eco). The decision was, do I post in a specific category, or do I post somewhere where it gets federated? In the end I decided neither, as the eco category isn’t federated and is pretty much empty.
Further mastodon/fediverse lacks an algorithmic timeline, so a catch-all category might be too noisy to follow if it really took off, and a promotional focus wouldn’t gel well with fedi culture I think.
So I’d favour federating all the categories, so people can choose what they follow and what they don’t. Without an algorithmic timeline, it’s good to be more fine-grained in this way. If this is too much, limiting to a seen-at-nime tag might be good, but I think that would be best in response to a particular problem.
With wordpress federation I’ve seen comment sections come alive with thoughtful responses again, thanks to people commenting from mastodon. Forums like this one are generally very quiet due to attention capture from social media, and having full integration with mastodon could help rejuvenate it.
As I say though this is a great move whatever and happy to try out whatever you decide 
BTW for people interested in live coding, here’s a list of active community+project mastodon a/cs: TOPLAP: "The influx of livecoding communities + projects t…" - TOPLAP Social
Hi, I’m getting some teething problems..
I tried posting to the new category, but I couldn’t find the post on mastodon in order to boost it.
There doesn’t seem to be a presence for the ‘amplify’ category on the fediverse. I think normally you can subscribe to a category, that then boosts/retoots the posts made by users to that category. Otherwise I think you have to subscribe to all the users individually?
I can search for my @yaxu@forum.nime.org user, but not see any posts federated using it. That could be because I need to subscribe to it first, but that doesn’t seem to be possible - I can click follow but on refresh the button changes to a ‘cancel request’ button.
Again, in my opinion it could be good to experiment with federating everything to begin with.
Weird.. I’ll keep looking today. Definitely receptive and deferring to your experience in fedi-matters @yaxu
It’s a bit of a mystery to me to be honest! I get the impression that things start federating properly once people start subscribing and reposting things. My recent post seems to have worked so I think that’s starting to happen Thanks again for your efforts !
Ok I’ve federated all the categories where it seems to make sense — hope things actually end up published, it could be an issue of timing, e.g., it gets put into a background task and is published eventually, the server is pretty slow.
