It all started with a report about federation breaking between Lemmy and NodeBB. I was subconsciously aware that something was going on, but had chalked it up to network issues.

Observed behaviour showed that some remote categories would be receiving content in spurts, with long gaps in between.

I spent the next 3-4 days looking into it, but came up empty. Whatever was happening wasn't throwing any obvious errors, and along the way, I found what I thought was related (it was), but I wasn't sure why: against some Lemmy servers, the "follow"/"unfollow" mechanic would simply stop working, and this would often coincide with gaps in content. In some egregious cases, the flow of content stopped completely!

Unable to make headway, I had to reach out to the folks at Lemmy to figure out what the issue was. NodeBB occasionally sends non-200 level response

I'm assuming Unicode in handles is not allowed? At least by Mastodon.

This user is not able to have their content federated because the username is all Hebrew (I think?) characters!

I'm wondering how content on threadiverse is automatically assigned its community when received by the software (e.g. PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin).

The answer I am expecting is "if the community is addressed (to, cc, audience), then it is slotted into that community".

However that causes issues for compatibility with microblogs... for example, [email protected] recently authored a post that mentioned [[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected]) and it got slotted into that community on NodeBB, which isn't correct since that group is private.

Better practice would be to only trust the addressed community if it is Announce'd by the community directly, but would fall short if my instance does not receive the Announce (say, if nobody follows the community), in which case we'd fall back to "uncategorized", which is where all microblog posts currently go. Then i

Does anybody know what exactly Pleroma needs for a valid Webfinger check? I'm attempting to figure out why @[email protected] won't resolve in NodeBB, and it's because the webfinger call returns 400 Bad Request.

NodeBB is calling https://pleroma.debian.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Ajmtd%40pleroma.debian.social with User-Agent and Content-Type headers (curiously, it's not sending Accept, but it also fails if that header is set, so that's irrelevant.)

Navigating to that webfinger url in the browser returns XML, which is :grimacing: but I'm not even getting that when NodeBB makes the call.

In my ever-continuing use of NodeBB as a single-user Fediverse instance, here are some things I've noticed. Both things I've already talked about before, and some new things. These are some suggestions for functionality or perhaps plugins.

1. Confusion between following remote categories as a user and the synchronization options in category settings as an admin. I think the category synchronization should be repurposed somewhat. The suggestion from @[email protected] was to perhaps rework it as a cross-posting feature.
   • Right now, the feature relies on the other ActivityPub endpoint to be able to follow the NodeBB category, which (notably Lemmy) does not always work.
   • Making a "proxy user" is a pretty common solution to this, used by Misskey etc. One single system proxy user can follow all remote categories, and then NodeBB itself can handle the synchronization.
2. Lack of posts. This is a gener

Following up on this question I asked back in late March, I wanted to continue thinking about how one would handle cross-posting between categories/communities, given that there isn't current consensus on it, and especially given that NodeBB—as of v4.3.0—can now see and browse remote categories.

From that original topic, we can distil the following:

1. Both PieFed and Mbin do not natively handle cross-posts, a new entity is made with the crucial bits (link, text, possibly title) copied over and changed if needed, sometimes a "cross-posted from..." helper text is prepended.
2. There are legitimate concerns that a cross-post might not succeed depending on privilege settings on the receiving end, so a pre-flight check (or explicit rejection) of some kind might be required.
3. Cross-posting can be done by the or

tl;dr — you can now find remote categories and see your tracked/watched categories in /world.

A new alpha version of NodeBB was tagged today: v4.3.0-alpha.3. The biggest change is to the /world route, which up until now showed a list of topics from outside of the local NodeBB instance.

New to this alpha release:

1. A quick search widget was added, allowing you to directly search for remote categories. There is no need to navigate to to the search page to discover new categories.
2. Your list of tracked and watched categories will show at the top of the page.
   • "Tracking" and "Watching" categories—both local and remote—is how content discovery happens in NodeBB. Tracked categories will have new content show up in the "unread" page, while watched categories take that a step further and notify you when new content is posted.
   • Tracking and watching a category will tell NodeBB to subscribe to that remote community for updates

At this time we're continuing to l

tl;dr — how do PieFed/Lemmy/Mbin handle cross-posting?

Currently, when a NodeBB admin moves a topic from the uncategorized pseudo-category into a local category, we federate out an as:Announce, people typically think of that as a "boost" or "share".

That worked fine when the entirety of the category list was your local categories plus the "uncategorized" pseudo-category. However, now that NodeBB is moving towards supporting remote categories (via group actors), this UX makes less sense. We wouldn't want to "move" a topic out of the category it is supposed to be in, just for visibility to other local users. Additionally, topic moving was limited to administrators, and from the get-go we knew it would eventually cause issues because people other than admins would want to share topics to other local users.

This is where the "cross-post" functionality comes in, which is entirely new to NodeBB. I don't think this is new to other AP-enabled threaded discussion software. The idea w

As far as ActivityPub posts are concerned, how are Hashtags handled?

Is it just like normal and we add them in the posts?

Hey @[email protected], are Flipboard collections (or are they magazines? I forget the term!) federating out as as:Group? I'm wondering whether it would be possible for NodeBB to load them in as categories, and be able to browse them natively...

I'm just not able to easily find them in the Flipboard UI right now, but I'm relatively new at using the app :)

Happy Tuesday!

Today we've updated the NodeBB community forum onto the remote-categories testing branch, which means that users on the open social web that identify themselves as "Groups" will be rendered in NodeBB as categories. Prior to this, they looked like users.

Here are some examples of remote categories:

• Comic Strips (on lemmy.ml)
• Star Trek Social Club (on startrek.website)
• Social Web Foundation (a WordPress blog)

ActivityPub "groups" and forum categories have quite a few things in common — they don't usually post topic themselves, they "contain" topics, and they are usually administered by a separate group of users (moderators!) In many ways, these groups lend themselves to categories much more easily than they do as users.

Notes:

• We will likely be releasi

The upcoming possibility of browsing to remote federated categories/communities has me thinking about interesting use cases for it.

Note that Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, and other "community-centric" software already do support this, so it's nothing new, I'm actually playing catch-up.

One interesting use case centers around NodeBB's /unread route, which tracks new topics since your last visit. Since ever, and even now in v4, this is only for local categories, but if you're able to "subscribe" to a remote category, then we could enable use of this page for that content too.

Think about waking up and seeing a self-curated feed of new content from your subscribed communities! There are some interesting parallels to RSS here, too.

What other forum-centric use cases do you think would be enhanced by the ability to browse remote categories?

Hi @[email protected]/@freamon and @[email protected] —I'm working (not-so-secretly) on refactoring NodeBB so that it is able to "browse" remote audiences/group actors, and that would include things like PieFed and Lemmy communities.

N.B. Given varied nomenclature (group/category/community/subforum), the ForumWG calls this structure an "audience".

Where I am at now is working through the logic for slotting an object into a category.

The most obvious choice here would be to look at as:audience. It's even specified in 1b12, and the majority of threaded implementations follow 1b12.

I am making this post because nutomic explicitly removed the audience from being served in Lemmy (as of January this year), so I don't think relying on that property would be wise.

I asked

I followed [email protected] from my account on this instance, and another nodebb instance. This one shows Following, the other shows pending! Follows dont need acceptance do they, why the difference?

Also, why a settings icon only on my nodebb instance?!

@[email protected] recently made a statement that got me thinking about our place in the open social web, and the direction it's going.

He says to @[email protected] and @[email protected] re: SXSW

> #FediverseHouse this feels like an irrelevant echo chamber, I really miss the grassroots #DIY that built this space in the first place. This #maistreaming is too much noise vs signal... currently the grassroots #DIY space is a hollow shell

(two posts combined)

That immediately got me on edge as someone new to ActivityPub in 2024. Does this mean I'm "mainstream", and somehow "bad"?

Mainstream adoption is good and a step in the right direction. I personally think ActivityPub isn't ready for general mainstream consumption, but we as a group are ra

So I was wondering if there was a way for me to have a Category follow a federated account.

I can't seem to find the way to do it if that's possible.

But optimally the category would post a topic related to the new posts the followed account would post. Or something like that.

Wanted to start a convo with @[email protected] from Ghost and @[email protected] from Discourse about AP resource discovery.

A common use case from fediverse users is to be linked out to a site, and attempt to "bring it in" to their local instance/app of choice. This is done by taking the browser URL and pasting it into their site/app's search bar, or equivalent.

For example:

• Ghost: https://activitypub.ghost.org/warp-factor-5-mr-sulu/
• Discourse: any forum topic

For context, last night I discovered that Ghost's latest blog post didn't make it into NodeBB, due to a bug on my end. I attempted to resolve it via URL but there was no AP resource at that URL. I ended up having to query the instance actor (which I happened to already know), and looking at the outbox.

To my knowledge there is no way to find a Discourse post

Hey @[email protected], can I poke you about getting NodeBB on FediDB?

It automatically picked up a couple NodeBB sites, so I think the nodeinfo stuff is working, just not sure if it required some manual intervention on your end to get the software link working — it currently 404s.

Cheers :flag-ca:

For awhile now we've hosted https://try.nodebb.org/ as our demo instance for people to see a plain NodeBB instance.

I have added a federated category on that instance now. You can of course still make test posts to this instance, but you can also feel free to fill @[email protected] with garbage instead :laughing:

Please note that the "try" instance of NodeBB is reset every 24 hours, which means all follow relationships, content, etc. will only last at most that long. If you follow the category or an account on that instance, those categories/users will "forget" you followed them.