The free open source forum software NodeBB is now working on official Fediverse support. Federation isn't ready yet, but if this interests you, you might want to follow their account:
As it turns out, a lot of #ActivityPub verbs and objects correspond quite nicely with #nodebb verbs and objects (e.g. a like would be an upvote, etc.)
However I'm not exactly sure how the "announce" verb would translate. In #Mastodon, "announce" is a "boost". The closest forum-land equivalent would be the "bump", whereby a topic is brought back to the top of the list (usually through a reply).
Only downside, bumps are reserved for admins. Non-admins "bump" a topic by replying to it.
@trwnh you said earlier today — "having a topic is a useful feature or abstraction, and i'd like to see literally any support or thought given to it"
💯 will do. A post created in @nodebb will have a topic associated with it in its metadata as you've suggested. That just makes complete sense. It would continue to exist in the (sub-)category hierarchy already present in #nodebb
Since we just had issues with a #Discourse upgrade AGAIN on the OctoPrint community forums (the admin team is trying to fix things up as I'm typing this), does anyone here have experience with migrating from Discourse to #NodeBB by any chance?
Seriously considering a future move right now. We've had nothing but bad experiences with their "official supported way" of doing a self-hosted setup, and I feel really bad for the admins.
Finally figured out why #nodebb posts weren't queryable via Mastodon, turns out it does Content-Type checking, and I was inadvertently breaking #ActivityPub spec by sending in application/json when I should've been sending in "application/activity+json" or 'application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"'
Latter doesn't play nicely with express, so using the former and all's well!
Full credit to @bouncepaw who gave me key to figuring it out! 🏅
It seems this happens occasionally on #fedi where malicious users decide to take advantage of instances with poor moderation to spam widely.
There are many solutions, but let me offer a simple change that stops spam dead in its tracks:
#nodebb has a post queue built in. If you have 0 reputation, you need your post to be manually approved. You can adjust this as needed, but even the default (allow regular posting after 1 upvote) is sufficient. Stops 👏spam 👏 cold 👏.
Mea culpa time — you might've heard that we're hacking away (in the best sense of the word) at #ActivityPub support in #NodeBB, but it turns out someone asked for it back in 2019 and it got zero buy-in from our founders 😥
I'm looking forward to talking more about #NodeBB and #ActivityPub integration on here again, been distracted lately with other technical debt items — and of course — work to put food on the table 😄
Not going to lie, one of the support services is "mentoring on community building". You'd think the co-founder of a COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD SOFTWARE would be aces at building community, but truthfully, I really suck at it.
The fact that "build it and they will come" worked at all is miraculous.
ActivityPub is so neat! With all the new implementations coming out, it's slowly becoming my "one stop shop" internet aggregator.
For example, all from within my Mastodon instance I can:
Follow communities on Lemmy and Kbin, allowing me to interact with every post/comment and make my own post or comment to any community.
Follow my favorite podcasts and get new episodes directly in my feed via PodcastIndex.org
Follow WordPress blogs that have the ActivityPub plugin activated.
SOON enough I'll be able to:
Interact/follow accounts on Threads (and hopefully someday Instagram)
Follow/interact with comments/posts/communities from NodeBB forums.
This protocol is changing the internet and how I use it every day.
PS. If you want more information on how to do any of these things, just let me know and I will explain. Though please limit to asking about one or two at a time, as some are quite intricate in their implementations.
Edit: Nitter has been shut down 2 days after I posted this. Oh well. Fuck Xhitter
Just had an amazing call with @devnull of #nodebb on behalf of #flarum. His progress on their #federation implementation is already quite impressive. We've decided to keep in touch, share and collaborate on supported FEPs and regularly touch ground in the future.
The Two-Factor Authentication plugin that comes bundled with #NodeBB was just updated to v7.4.0. It now notifies you if your account was accessed, but the second factor challenge was not passed. If you see this notification, and it wasn't you, you just might want to change your now-compromised password!
Oft forgotten, this feature provides much needed positive reinforcement that, yeah, #2FA works!
Thinking about Hacker News but sprinkled with #activitypub
imagine being able to reply and participate to any #HN post from the #fediverse and with #webmentions have fediverse comments mingled with native HN activity.
People sometimes ask how we got #nodebb to be so fast and performant.
Our secret weapon is being #Canadian 🇨🇦 — you see... our internet is so fucking expensive we can't afford the faster plans, so we have to make our code run fast otherwise we will die before the page loads.
We hold the wonderful distinction of having the most expensive internet in the world on a $/mbits scale 🙄
I'm hearing rumours that #NodeBB is adding support for #ActivityPub. Some folks have told me that this implementation will have group federation capabilities similar to #Lemmy and #Kbin.
I need to investigate this rumour further. If true, this is huge.
At the very least, I know NodeBB is discussing ActivityPub.
For those who prefer a bulletin board interface for the #Fediverse, this is pretty darn attractive. Anyone who was active with Internet forums back in the ‘90s and ‘00s would love this quite a lot.
As many of us know, the problem with old Internet forums is that, while they provided a cozy community for folks who liked to follow specific topics, they often died because the likes of Facebook simply had a larger network effect.
But with NodeBB and ActivityPub, Internet forums may soon find that they have a network effect of hundreds of millions of people.
If you ever used Internet forums but have since stopped, would NodeBB’s foray into the Fediverse have you increase your participation with them again?
Initial federated contact made! My local dev instance has just made its first calls to a remote #Mastodon instance (via #WebFinger discovery) to retrieve a remote user account!
One small step for #NodeBB, ah... also one small step for the #Fediverse I guess.
As expected, when an instance attempts to respond to a Note with a larger audience than the note replied to, Mastodon will silently drop it from processing.
I don't actually know if this is codified anywhere in #ActivityPub or #ActivityStreams spec, but looking into it now. 💪
Edit: Might be it actually is processed, but doesn't link up to the more-restrictive parent. Also good I think. Not quite sure how I'd handle this in #nodebb ...
Last week I broke the screen on my phone and have been using an old broken Pixel 3a in the interim. A significant portion of the keyboard does not respond to taps, so I can't even log into Google (as the login screen is portrait-only), so no play store, and it's been an interesting experiment to carry on my day without apps.
First thought: people absolutely SUCK at building fast websites. Mastodon, Fastmail, Discord, Messenger (duh). Hot garbage.
At the end of the day, if an implementor chooses to send everything as as:Note, that's their call, but more "correct" types should be used. Even as:Page is a step in the right direction as it is sufficient generic to encompass a lot.
Perhaps #nodebb will send topics as as:OrderedCollection, because at its core, what is a topic but an ordered collection of posts/notes?
Disappointed, but not surprised, by the utter lack of interest in #ActivityPub over at #XenForo.
XF 2.2 was released in Sep 2020. XF 2.3 will drop sometime this year, however, IMHO, none of the new features were worth waiting 3+ years (a lifetime ago) for.
Maybe something I can try for the purpose of learning #Rust is setting up a real-time communication channel in #NodeBB (i.e. a socket that the web UI could use to show real-time information, typing indicators, etc). Maybe it's too easy or too hard... I also have an audio processing project I intend on doing in Rust but I haven't managed to get myself to do that yet.
Also, I still want #PikaPods to have NodeBB. It might become affordable for a lot more communities that way! There's a request lodged for it in their feedback thing but there's currently no indication they plan on adding it.