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Colibri Social Documentation

Moderating Across AppViews

Colibri is self-hostable, so the communities you’re in aren’t necessarily all hosted in the same place. A community lives on one AppView, and you sign in to one AppView, and those two don’t have to match.

Most of the time this is invisible. Reading messages, browsing members, seeing who is banned: all of that works the same wherever a community is hosted, because the data lives in the community’s own repository and reaches every AppView.

Moderating is different. Only the AppView hosting a community can change it. So when you ban someone, rename a channel, or edit community settings, your AppView has to pass that request along to the one hosting the community.

Why you might need to turn on presence sharing

Section titled “Why you might need to turn on presence sharing”

Before the AppView hosting a community will act on your behalf, it needs to know that your AppView is allowed to speak for you. It checks that by looking at your public profile for the AppView you use.

That’s the same information the Share presence across AppViews setting publishes. So if you’ve turned that off, no other AppView knows which AppView is yours, and moderating a community hosted elsewhere stops working.

You’ll see this as a warning on the members and banned-users screens of an affected community, or as a prompt when an action is refused. Both offer to switch presence sharing back on.

To do it yourself, open Settings, go to Preferences, and turn on Share presence across AppViews.

What this publishes about you

Section titled “What this publishes about you”

Turning presence sharing on adds one thing to your public profile: which AppView you use. It’s a hostname, and it’s readable by anyone, like the rest of your profile.

It doesn’t publish who you moderate, what you moderate, or anything about the communities you’re in. Turning the setting off removes it again.

Why it’s tied to presence sharing

Section titled “Why it’s tied to presence sharing”

Both answer the same question: which AppView is allowed to act for you. Presence sharing needed that so your online status could travel between AppViews, and moderation needs it so a community hosted elsewhere can tell a genuine request from a forged one. Rather than ask you to publish the same thing twice under two settings, Colibri reuses the one you already have.

If something still doesn’t work

Section titled “If something still doesn’t work”
  • The action fails and mentions reaching an AppView. The AppView hosting that community is unreachable or offline. Nothing is wrong on your side, and retrying later usually works.
  • The action fails saying the community is managed somewhere else. The community moved to a different AppView recently and your view is stale. Reload Colibri.
  • You have no moderation powers at all. That’s a role and permission question rather than an AppView one. Ask an admin of that community to check your roles.

See also

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