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 releasing this as v4.3.0-alpha this Wednesday. Probably this means you don’t want this on a live forum just yet.
• A lot of the backend logic is complete, but a lot of the frontend UX will be worked on.
• You can “search” for categories (via “in categories” in the search page), paste the full handle in order to instruct NodeBB to pull a new category in.
• You can now no longer mention a remote category. Instead, create your topic right in that category itself. As it should be :smirk_cat: .
• Remote content coming in that is slotted into a remote category will still show up in your “world” feed. That is still intended to be where discovery of content outside the local NodeBB instance will take place.
• Report any bugs or confusing behaviours (and there will be some) here.

Screenshots