@julian@community.nodebb.org
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

julian

@julian@community.nodebb.org

Hi! I'm Julian, one of the co-founders of NodeBB, the forum software you are using right now. I started this company with two colleagues, Baris and Andrew, in 2013, and have been doing the startup thing since (although I think at some point along the way we stopped being a startup and just became a boring ol' small business). In my free time I rock climb, cycle, and lift weights. I live just outside Toronto, Canada, with my wife and three children.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

The latest change to the ActivityPub integration for NodeBB introduces the concept of "group actors" to categories.

This change means that categories can be configured to be visible to other applications connected to the social web (including Mastodon, Misskey, and also other NodeBBs!)

49225588-744e-43f9-bfc4-950cb6f116fb-image.png

When followed, it means that any post made to the category will be automatically shared to anyone who follows that category.

NodeBB already supported this locally. You could set your watch state for a particular category to "tracking" or "watching", the latter allowing you to be notified of new posts.

Also of note is that remote replies to topics contained within a category will also be shared to the category's followers. This distinction means that you can effectively follow a specific category or sub-category in order to stay up-to-date on all discussions within that category.

As of today, users cannot create topics in a category from the social web (e.g. I cannot create a new topic in a NodeBB category), yet. That will come soon.

For the NodeBB community forum, the following categories are followable for now:

  1. General Discussion
  2. NodeBB Development
  3. NodeBB Development > ActivityPub

Lastly, all of this follows the FEP-1b12 Group Federation enhancement proposal.

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

I am very aware that one of the "holy grail" of fediverse applications seems to be private group discussions.

There's some R&D that needs to be done before we can even approach that — namely, post visibility controls — but this latest change lays the foundations toward that eventual goal.

shoq, to random
@shoq@mastodon.social avatar

@julian We’ve just installed NBB on one of our hosts. Really excited about digging into it next week. Where’s the best place to bring questions?

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

Hey @shoq, glad you got it up and running. What's important to know for you is that the current stable v3.7.1 does not contain ActivityPub code.

Tomorrow, I will put together a short guide for parties such as yourself, who are interested in playing with the pre-alpha code.

In the meantime, the best place to ask questions would be to either tag me (like you just did) or @baris (for non-AP stuff), or create a new topic in the Technical Support category.

Unfortunately you cannot post directly to the category from the fediverse yet. Give me a week or so.

box464, to threads
@box464@mastodon.social avatar

An interesting tidbit about the Threads opt-in process. I tried turning the opt-in on and then quickly back off - when you turn it off, you can't turn it back on for 30 days.

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

then shut it off so they don't have to deal with the consequences?

Yup, that's the one use-case I immediately thought of. I suppose in this case a 30-day cooldown is pretty effective, then.

@box464 @chrisod

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

One of the interesting items that came out of this year's FediForum was a speed demo by @thisismissem for IFTAS FediCheck, an upcoming service that will allow Mastodon server administrators to subscribe to specific one or more CARIADs — Consensus Aggregated Retractable IFTAS Allowlist Denylist — and have them automatically maintained by FediCheck.

This sort of work is hugely important for Trust & Safety. At a local level, the work required to ensure T&S scales linearly with your community size. This goes out the window when you factor in the ability to network with separate instances each with their own culture, community, etc. — suddenly, a small intimate forum with a single admin could become inundated with inappropriate content from outside of the local instance.

Being in-development, IFTAS FediCheck is Mastodon-only, but there are huge benefits to the broader fediverse network of applications, NodeBB included.

We could lobby (likely unsuccessfully) for IFTAS to support NodeBB, but it would definitely be better overall if IFTAS supported an API that we could build plugins/libraries against.

For more information about IFTAS: @iftas

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

Also, FediCheck is a push based service, we push to you.

Right! Theoretically one could continue with that by having an API where one registers a webhook, and the software handles the incoming data and updates the lists accordingly.

It'd be a lower-level integration, since FediCheck wouldn't be handling all aspects of the list management, part of that work, the implementation-specific list management, could be handed off to the individual implementors themselves.

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

NodeBB is at this year's FediForum, and one of the breakout sessions centred around the Theadiverse, the subset of ActivityPub-enabled applications built around a topic-centric model of content representation.

Some of the topic touched upon included:

  • Aligning on a standard representation for collections of Notes
  • FEP-1b12 — Group federation and implementation thereof by Lemmy, et al.
  • Offering a comparatively more feature-rich experience vis-a-vis restrictions re: microblogging
  • Going forward: collaborating on building compatible threadiverse implementations

The main action item involved the genesis of an informal working group for the threadiverse, in order to align our disparate implementations toward a common path.

We intend to meet monthly at first, with the first meeting likely sometime early-to-mid April.

The topic of the first WG call is: Representation of the higher level collection of Notes (posts, etc.) — Article vs. Page, etc?

Interested?

  • Publicly reply to this post (NodeBB does not support non-public posts at this time) if you'd like to join the list
  • If you prefer to remain private, please email julian@nodebb.org

As an aside, I'd love to try something new and attempt to keep as much of this as I can on the social web. Can you do me a favour and boost this to your followers?

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@J12t working under or alongside the fedidevs network would lend some credibility to an otherwise skunkworks-like group.

Keeping this front-of-mind, but would likely wait and see how first session goes.

Very interested in checking out that session tomorrow as well though, let's chat.

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@scott +1 on all of the above.

Unnecessary duplication of resources would be unfortunate, so let's avoid that.

Part of the discussion on the fedidevs session (which I think you were in?) centred around building that one central directory for resources.

I'm not sure whether @andypiper or @J12t have any specific software in mind (oooh, federated wiki? haha), but could be Federated Hub; have you got a link?

I'm focusing on getting category actors up ASAP so I can make a followable category for the WG.

mapache, to fediverse
@mapache@hachyderm.io avatar

is live! @fediforum and the first demo by @julian is also live!

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@mapache I always hear about Elk on fedi, will give it a go! The default Mastodon client is ok, but always looking for alternatives

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

Hi FediForum! This is a note I am writing during the speed demo for NodeBB. If you're seeing this, maybe give me a quick boost or like!

NodeBB supports Markdown, which is sent through AP, so you can bold stuff, italicise, and much more!

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take
— Wayne Gretzky

— Julian Lam

Have a great day!

box464, to fediverse
@box464@mastodon.social avatar

What would a federated helpdesk look like for federated platforms?

  • Shared KB articles, up and down voted across instances
  • Shared community Q&A forums (Ask, Best Answer format)
  • Shared support / moderation staff (?)

Just a random brain buzz this morning. Not sure it's any more helpful than something like joinmastodon.org and such.

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

Really good question! Forums have been a huge part of support for a long time. If you think back to the last time you needed help with something, and did a web search, chances are that between the LLM-generated and SEO-optimized trash, the most helpful site was a forum.

Real people, talking about real issues (no matter how small), with the conversation indexable in order to help future visitors.

Federation can break down the barrier to accessing forums, and further participation. If you stumbled upon an AP-enabled forum, you could theoretically click a button, and be redirected to that same topic, but on your home instance (whether it be another NodeBB, /kbin, Mastodon, etc.) and immediately contribute.

AP even has support for "Question", but that got co-opted by Mastodon for their polling implementation, so I am not entirely certain what Q&A (which NodeBB does support!) would look like federated.

@box464

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

Actually, @leroy had some interesting ideas when he played around with this concept back in late 2023.

Specifically collapsing an entire topic tree into a linear style has potential readability issues with out of band posts especially if the topic tree is very wide, so he played with the idea of automatically "quoting" a post if it didn't immediately follow its parent.

@box464

box464, to random
@box464@mastodon.social avatar

Attended the @fediforum meet and greet this morning but chickened out of doing an introduction. 🐔 There were plenty of great intros, and quite a diverse group - developers, end users, content creators and platform leads. Really great to see.

One of these days there will be enough interest for an end-user conference, I can feel it.

Looking forward to the demo quick rounds, seems like there will be many!

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

I saw you there! I remarked to myself that you look like your avatar hehe

danluu, to random
@danluu@mastodon.social avatar

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices:

https://danluu.com/slow-device/

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@danluu congrats on hitting the top of HN!

I am interested in seeing whether @nodebb would fare better in your testing. We spent quite a bit of time over the years on making it wicked fast, and I personally feel it is a better representation of modern forum software than Discourse, at least on speed and initial payload.

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@danluu wow, thanks so much for running your test for me! It means a lot.

Also your note about our abnormally high LCP (sans asterisk) is interesting, considering the tricks that other sites utilize to artificially lower LCP, but which we don't bother with.

Ironically since the LCP* is lower than LCP, it suggests that us fixing this only results in a higher PageSpeed score but might not actually result in net benefit for end users. Ha!... but if there is a content shift, that's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.

I'm not going to lie and say we don't chase metrics, we totally do... we just try to increase our metrics by actually making the site faster!

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

Haven't had the chance to test with other software, but sending Update(Note) via AP is accepted by Mastodon, but the resulting note isn't updated.

I thought it might be because I wasn't sending an id with my Update activity, so I started sending one, but no dice. Anyone have any other ideas?

On the upside, Update propagations work fine between NodeBB instances, so that's pretty cool.

##### Test topic once again

In this topic, I will be testing post editing, which should properly federate to followers via ActivityPub. => This is the edited text! Here is a second upda...

[ faviconNodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance (bb.devnull.land)

](https://bb.devnull.land/topic/9/test-topic-once-again)

thisismissem, to random
@thisismissem@hachyderm.io avatar

Someone should really make an Apple Mail extension that's like “If I reply to these email addresses, automatically make my emails plain text, not HTML”

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@thisismissem I really think we went full circle with html email when growth hackers discovered that one neat trick to getting your users to actually read an email was to send stuff plaintext, because HTML emails get ignored as marketing spam.

box464, to random
@box464@mastodon.social avatar

Setting up various ActivityPub implementations lately (small, single user stuff and one larger one). The incoming requests are rivers of DELETEs, most of which have never actually interacted my instance before.

I understand the reasoning, but wish there was a layer above my instance directing irrelevant AP traffic away from my little single user server.

Recommendation: Don't federate with large instances if you're just tinkering around with stuff.

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@box464 I'm surprised that servers just spray Deletes to every known instance, but I can see the reasoning: if every received instance shares the delete to every known server, it propagates more thoroughly.

It may be worth maintaining a lookup table for object ids purely to handle this scenario, eh...

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@box464 @jenniferplusplus are they signatures from the now-deleted user? I'd assume they'd not resolve if you tried to verify them.

However deletes you could sign using the instance signature, if your instance has one.

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

A quick ones (hopefully) this evening...

Whenever I have a post with a mention, Mastodon likes to convert it into an attachment and display it in a preview box. Not sure what I'm doing different from other implementors to get this special treatment! I explicitly send attachment: [] but to no avail...

I had two questions, but I forget the second one now. Darn ADHD.

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

The fact that AP defaults to HTML for the content annoys me to no end. It just increases the attack surface by so so much x_x

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@hrefna @erincandescent I hate to put forth a "slippery slope" argument, but I think it fits here.

If each implementor has their own specific rules for sanitization (NodeBB has their own, too — an allow-list of tags/attributes), then we could potentially end up in a situation not-unlike email, where the list of acceptable tags is so restrictive that everybody ends up defaulting to sending out a janky subset of html so it comes through properly.

That said, one thing that's going for AP-at-current is that at least there's no expectation that federated content be rendered like a full webpage.

<marquee>that would be tragic</marquee>

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@hrefna sounds like you're volunteering yourself for an FEP snerk

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

How much of fediverse security is just like… reacting in the moment when there is a problem and hoping that you don't break everything?

julian,
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

@hrefna I think by default any sort of software doesn't get built with an expectation that the origin IP will not be leaked. You can't really enforce that easily unless you're in control of the entire deployment stack.

For example, I create forum software for others to deploy. I can ask they they run all their outgoing requests through a proxy, but I can't enforce that.

Leading a horse to water, and all...

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