Lemmy's removal of audience in posts?

Hi Nutomic, thanks for joining the forum.

While I have you, I wanted to ask you about the removal of audience from Lemmy. I believe the rationale for it was that it was not used outside of Lemmy, but both Piefed (rimu@piefed.social) and NodeBB use it.

I still think the explicit use of the audience property is more helpful than not.

I discovered another use case for it, although it is a bit of an edge case. Last night a user from lemmy.ca posted to activitypub@community.nodebb.org. Here, there are no followers to that group actor, so it did not federate here. However, one of the relays this site subscribes to did Announce the topic, and when it arrived here, NodeBB could not accurately determine whether the topic/post _actually belonged to activitypub@community.nodebb.org.

Specifically, it is because sometimes users (on Mastodon or other sites) mention group actors but don’t intend for the post to be made there. It is not a strong enough signal.

But audience being explicitly set does provide that strong signal. I’ve updated NodeBB’s code to trust the group actor if located in audience.