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:

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

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  • julian@community.nodebb.orgOP
    1·
    2 days ago

    @AltCode I forked this out to a new topic. I think it’s time to loop @pfefferle@mastodon.social into the conversation (at the very least so this could be potentially escalated).

    Mattias, it seems that when the WPML and ActivityPub plugins are enabled together, notes federated out by the blog user in another language have different ids but the same preferredUsername.

    e.g. ruari@vivaldi.com: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46 and https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46

    NodeBB interprets this as two different users. Curiously, Mastodon does not, the second ID explicitly does not resolve.

    So there can be two solutions here:

    1. The underlying issue can be fixed by WordPress, the solution of which is out of scope (for me at least)
    2. NodeBB can adopt whatever mechanism Mastodon is using… which is most likely that Mastodon does a two-way when asserting an ID, and ensures that the webfinger resource points to the ID.
    • julian@community.nodebb.orgOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      The remaining questions here are:

      • whether preferredUsername is meant to be unique to the instance (in which case having multiple ids point to an identical preferredUsername would be a violation), and
      • what exactly AP software should do when it encounters this situation… store a list of “known alias” IDs? There are potential security issues to doing so.