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:
Back in late July, we took a chance and applied for the @NGIZero NGI0 Core August 2023 call for projects. Our application dealt almost entirely with bringing #ActivityPub to #NodeBB, and we're happy to announce that we've been officially greenlit!
Looking forward to working in tandem with some other highly esteemed colleagues @helge and @tchambers with their testing suites too 🙂 (edit: @J12t too!)
The other small part of our application dealt with much-needed accessibility audits and fixes 💪
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.
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
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?
Whoa! This is not a rumour! @nodebb actually confirmed they’re joining the #Fediverse!
Hooray! #ActivityPub integration is on its way! This is a big deal because #NodeBB is mature forum software that’s been in development for quite some time!
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 😥
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 👏.
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.
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.
@leroy nothing so specific, at that point I was only doing a thought experiment at a high level.
I am still working out ideas, but I have been leaning towards broadcasting the "Announce" activity when a local #NodeBB user decides to move a post out of the "federated" topic list and into the local categories.
There is also this #FEP, which I am inclined to follow for the sake of being a team player 😆
Nearly a decade ago, we saw signs saying maybe social media wasn't the answer to interconnecting humanity. We looked back and found that many forums of yesteryear were not only still kicking, but kicking ass. We decided it was time to bring forums to the next decade, and beyond 🚀.
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.
(adres z forum wbity w szukajke mastodona wyświetli się)
"Dziś jest dzień, w którym nasze forum społeczności łączy się z #fediverse. Zaktualizowaliśmy kod i przełączyliśmy się na gałąź #activitypub, a także włączyliśmy federację w dwóch kategoriach, kategorii #NodeBB Development (która jest tylko do odczytu dla wszystkich oprócz staff NodeBB) oraz Testing Ground, która jest przeznaczona dla treści bez znaczenia."
Tak więc nowa wersja NodeBB ma federację profili i publicznych postów, komentarze z fedi "widzi" i uwzględnia 🚀 🎉
I have so many follow relationships with so many talented people here!
It's so great to see all of you and your interesting projects and creations across such a variety of hobbies and professions.
It's only going to get better with Threads federation under way! Future of Fedi will sure be interesting and I'm glad to be a part of something that could fundamentally change the way "Internet" is done as a whole.
The future awaits. After years of gaining steam, Fedi has arrived.
Would love to hear your reasoning why!
Personally, I like the possibility of tangents in Reddit BUT I think I prefer the focus of staying on topic from a single thread.
I discovered #NodeBB via Cloudron 2 years ago. I am very happy with and highly recommend both products.
And can recommend the actual Cloudron forums for not only the excellent support by staff that goes above & beyond, but also the valuable input from users when it comes to discovery and filtering for quality apps.
One drawback of POSSE is that you’re bolstering the value of the silos. Instagram grows more powerful with your pictures on it and GitHub thrives on your repos.
Sandra, I'm really glad I had the opportunity to catch your review, or rather, observation of POSSE, especially the long term ramifications from the PoV of #DeSoc.
For quite some time now, I've been advocating for something that describes a not so dissimilar modus operandi for extricating subjugated chattel from that of the #Borg_Collective.
POSSE has merit, being a partial design for disrupting the deprecated monolithic silos, but IMO actually falls short by only seeking to coexist with it, instead of completely obviating them.
As a dedicated FOSS and Privacy Advocate, here's my take on how we can follow a best practices modus operandi, achieving what can eventually relegate today's monolithic silos into the marginalized zone, sending them into the abyss of downtrodden insignificance.
The model can work from any Fediverse platform, but platforms that support a rich feature set with longform authoring capabilities work best, having the greatest impact. For those stuck using masto for the time being, their impact will be less dramatic, but nonetheless still valid.
The model I've been advocating goes like this:
) Create original content on Fediverse enabled properties you own, or cite (link to) content NOT residing in the deprecated silo space (Twitter, Medium, TikTok, InstaSPAM, YouTube, Faceplant, Reddit, Linkedin, Etc.). You can do this from pretty much any Fediverse platform - even masto, with its paltry 500 character limit. A paragraph or so as a rule of thumb, just a teaser/headline to create interest for the reader to follow the link.
) Optional: For added impact and if you have any, from your traditional silo account(s), as well as from less capable clones like masto, offer up a teaser, perhaps a paragraph or so, with a link to the URL of this original content.
) If you're merely pointing to an article or resource created by someone else that exists independently, that's it. Well done! If you created your original content in long form on a more capable Fediverse platform than masto - there are many excellent Fediverse platforms for doing this. A few of those are:
) Endeavor to never publish any actual content (articles, news, photos, videos) on platforms in the deprecated monolithic silo space. Instead, it is preferable to publish your photos, videos on demand, and textual content on a Fediverse Platform well suited to this. i.e., PeerTube for VoDs, Pixelfed for images, and one or more of the platforms mentioned above for textual or multimedia based content such as news articles, HowTo's, tutorials, recipes, Etc.
) Occasionally, you may find it necessary to link to content in the deprecated silo space - a video on YouTube, for example. You may be able to clone videos (depending on licensing) to a PeerTube server, but if not, then make sure you sanitize those videos by using tools such as Invidious that shield the viewer from tracking and other privacy disrespecting constructs built into those silo systems.
The philosophy here is to ensure that anything posted into the deprecated monolithic silo space entreats the reader/viewer to leave that space in order to consume the content.
This practice insures that the consumer of that information does so in a protected, privacy respecting place, presumably built on FOSS, and in the Fediverse. It further serves to familiarize the consumer in an easy and unassuming way, with Fediverse platforms that do not track them or mine their privacy.
For the Fedizen however, it provides a one way transit - anyone seeing a teaser/headline/intro on say, Twitter or Faceplant, is immediately catapulted away from those denizens of commodification that packages and inventories the consumer as the product for sale, depriving those platforms of the necessary revenue that sustains them - death by atrophe. No blissful coexistence, every single post inside the deprecated monolithic silo space is in fact an egress point bringing the consumer into a free and privacy respecting environment.
Obviously, an article on the New York Times website isn't ideal, but it isn't strictly one of the monolithic silo systems listed above either. In this case specifically, it's a walled garden however, so you're directing the consumer to a place where they'll be privacy mined anyway, which offers three other possibilities:
You can, and should unless you feel you absolutely must, elect not to send someone to that resource
You can, under certain circumstances, copy that data verbatim elsewhere and provide a link to that place where you copied the data.
You can also probably check with the AP, since we're talking about a newspaper outlet, most of which actually pull their news from the Associated Press and other similar networks that provide free access, which you can link to instead.
There's simply no way to completely ensure being so mindful of your consumers without precluding yourself from linking to some forms of interesting content - but the point here is that almost without exception, you're not sending anyone into the deprecated monolithic silo space - you're sending them into the Fediverse, where they'll begin to become comfortable with, eventually creating their own accounts here.
I recently had some discussions with a few folks who completely turned their back on things like Twitter, which is good because it is one of those social networking systems that engages in tracking and privacy mining. Those individuals have made it easy for themselves by simply putting the existence of those privacy disrespecting resources completely outside the real of consideration - it's not like anyone is going to suffer because they didn't visit Faceplant. They may suffer a bit of withdrawals, but bear the following in mind:
There are liquor stores on virtually every corner in the real world. They sell booze at liquor stores. An alcoholic must come to terms with this and learn to live with this fact, making a conscious choice to buy, or not to buy booze in those stores, or even go outside where the temptation is even greater.
That's not the greatest metaphor I know, or maybe I just didn't deliver it well. Either way, I hope that in understanding this death by atrittion model, that people can make better informed decisions about privacy for themselves and others.
I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on the matter, and any tools that help assist folks in addressing privacy concerns. Please feel free to share this by boosting to raise awareness within the Fediverse (and beyond) of all the excellent platforms available to everyone in the Fediverse. I realize I left out large sectors of the Fediverse that can be factored into this formula - the link aggregators and forums like #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Kbin, #Mbin, #Discourse, and more. I didn't even directly address the purpose built single user instance platforms. Maybe we can give them some coverage in a later edition :)
Markdown published on NodeBB is preserved surprisingly well on Mitra, including the H3 heading. The bullets in the unordered list look really nice too.
Included is a screenie of what it looks like from both sides of the interaction between #NodeBB and a typical #Fediverse platform instance.