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For awhile now we've hosted https://try.nodebb.org/ as our demo instance for people to see a plain NodeBB instance.

I have added a federated category on that instance now. You can of course still make test posts to this instance, but you can also feel free to fill @federated@try.nodebb.org with garbage instead :laughing:

Please note that the "try" instance of NodeBB is reset every 24 hours, which means all follow relationships, content, etc. will only last at most that long. If you follow the category or an account on that instance, those categories/users will "forget" you followed them.

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The logs from this are already cleared on my server, but when I sent a private message (standard Create/Note with a single recipient who also has a Mention in the tag property) from my custom software to my account here, I received a 500 error saying something like "cc is not iterable" (though I don't know the exact phrasing). When I included cc as an empty array, it started working. Not sure whether it was missing on Create or Note, maybe it was both.

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1b12 vs Guppe groups (community.nodebb.org)

@panos brought up something interesting recently, which is that Lemmy communities don't boost everything (at least when viewed from Mastodon), but just the original post.

I wasn't sure whether this was intentional (because 1b12 definitely specifies that everything is boosted, replies and all). The only explanation I can think of is that 1b12 boosts activities, and Mastodon doesn't understand that, so it's actually an implementation quirk that causes Mastodon to not actually see the entire conversation.

NodeBB used to Announce(Note) and Announce(Create(Note)), and it meant that Mastodon was seeing everything. This was desirable from a synchronization standpoint, but it meant everything was going into Mastodon user feeds, which was @panos' concern.

I think Guppe (which is kind of like 1b12? Not sure) boosts everything, but again, am not 100% sure.

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I was looking at this post from my own forum (nBB 4.0.3) via various vectors, and trying to pull it in from here resulted in a couple of hiccups.

  1. Searching the posts community.nodebb.org URL did not pull the post and its comments. Naturally, searching the original URL works fine (though does not fetch the comments, naturally)
  2. Fetching my comment from that post does fetch the post and full comment chain, but your comment, @julian, is surprisingly empty (link)

6b4f9509-8c7a-4705-9a27-40476dccfebb-image.png

Just thought you'd like to know.

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Test from PieFed! (piefed.social)

PieFed is very similar to Lemmy, but with a couple small differences that a couple people prefer. It seems to be retrieving the community okay, we'll see if this post goes through.

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World Boost (community.nodebb.org)

Previously discussed, it takes a while to follow a set of people who might post on the topic of your forum. Having done that, and got an interesting World feed, its a shame that isnt available to new users

Suggestion, World category has MyWorld, and World tabs Where World follows Admins followings, and MyWorld shows post from the users followings

Hence new users get access to a World feed which is already populated. It would make the most of this feature, that is completely empty for new users, who probably wont have any idea how to start getting posts in there

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@activitypub Hey, thanks for the awesome ActivityPub support!

It has been working great so far on our forum at fbrc.nodebb.com, with two exceptions. I don't know if these are bugs or if they fall in NodeBB scope or not, figured I'd report them here:

  1. Alt text not transferring to Mastodon. This post has alt text in NodeBB (I think), it's not showing up when viewed via Mastodon web UI: https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub
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Long-formers Activate! (community.nodebb.org)

Among the fediverse there are microblogs (your Mastodons, Misskeys(+forks), etc.

Then there are the long form peeps. We managed to all find each other at FOSDEM 2025.

Pictured is @matt@writing.exchange (Write freely), @pfefferle@mastodon.social (WordPress), and yours truly (NodeBB). We also had some good conversations with @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz (Ghost), but I wasn't quick enough with my camera 😩

Let's move the state of long-form text on the open social web, forward!

1000007220.jpg

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See you at FOSDEM! (community.nodebb.org)

NodeBB will be making an appearance at this year's FOSDEM!

I'll like be present at the Social Web dev room during FOSDEM itself, and will be presenting a talk at the Social Web After Hours event alongside @darius@friend.camp, @pfefferle@mastodon.social, and @j12t@j12t.social at Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL), on Sunday evening.

I'll be talking up the SWICG Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force, and what we're working on to solve one of fedi's hard problems: combating the notion that "the fediverse is quiet". Come and listen!

Thank you to the great folks at @ngizero@mastodon.xyz, who have kindly funded my way there this year.

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Is ActivityPub too complicated? (community.nodebb.org)

767e2ed4-8089-40ab-92a8-7fb2204b20bd-image.png

I thought that if I entered a Fediverse address here, like '@FrankM@nrw.social,' it would follow that user, and their posts would then appear in the corresponding category.

But that's not happening. There's also no meaningful error message. The actor you see in the image probably appears because I entered an incorrect address.

Does this feature need to be enabled on the Fediverse instance 'nrw.social'?

Who can help?

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For some reason, I'm unable to view the profile page of certain remote accounts here at community.nodebb.org.

So far, I've only noticed it with some accounts from my Mastodon instance - particularly, my own account, @AltCode@social.vivaldi.net, and the @Vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net account, which should be viewable at https://community.nodebb.org/user/altcode@social.vivaldi.net and https://community.nodebb.org/user/vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net respectively. Instead, trying to go to either of those profile pages produces a 404 error; it's weird though, because these accounts used to work fine before.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to report this. I considered creating an issue on the GitHub repo, but at the moment I have no idea if it can affect accounts from other instances (let alone, other activitypub software), or only those from social.vivaldi.net.

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I subscribed to activitypub@community.nodebb.org earlier, and got my first post. The activity looked like:

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "actor": "https://community.nodebb.org/category/30",
  "cc": [
    "https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/followers"
  ],
  "id": "https://community.nodebb.org/post/https%3A%2F%2Fcommunity.nodebb.org%2Fpost%2F102768#activity/announce/1737427447686",
  "object": {
    "cc": [
      "https://community.nodebb.org/uid/24276/followers"
    ],
    "id": "https://community.nodebb.org/post/102768#activity/create/1737427442685",
    "object": {
      "@context": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        {
          "Emoji": "toot:Emoji",
          "toot": "http://joinmastodon.org/ns"
        }
      ],
      "attachment": [],
      "attributedTo": "https://community.nodebb.org/uid/24276",
      "audience": "https://community.nodebb.org/category/30",
      "cc": [
        "https://community.nodebb.org/uid/24276/followers"
      ],
      "content": "<p>Looking through my logs (snip).</p>\n",
      "context": "https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18546",
      "id": "https://community.nodebb.org/post/102768",
      "inReplyTo": null,
      "name": "User Agent Used for Federation?",
      "published": "2025-01-21T02:43:57.558Z",
      "replies": "https://community.nodebb.org/post/102768/replies",
      "source": {
        "content": "Looking through my logs (snip)",
        "mediaType": "text/markdown"
      },
      "summary": null,
      "tag": [],
      "to": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
      ],
      "type": "Note",
      "updated": null,
      "url": "https://community.nodebb.org/post/102768"
    },
    "to": [
      "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
    ],
    "type": "Create"
  },
  "to": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
  ],
  "type": "Announce"
}

As you can see, there's an 'actor' in the Announce (for the community), and 'attributedTo' in the Note (for the user), but no 'actor' in the Create part. I've not seen this behaviour on any other platforms - there's always an 'actor', with the same value as the 'attributedTo' field in the Note.

I tried to reply to my account on another platform on post , but it didn't federate out (I don't know if having to wait for moderator approval affects this). Given that Announce normally just wraps the original object, it suggests that there'll also be no 'actor' in 'Create' when it's just 'Create/Note' being sent out, but I haven't been able to check. This is a bit inconvenient (for me at least), because I'm used to using that field to get the details of the user who signed the request, and it'll be a pain to have to dig into the Note's 'attributedTo' field to find it.

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User Agent Used for Federation? (community.nodebb.org)

Looking through my logs it seems that NodeBB doesn't have any defined User Agent for it's ActivityPub requests.

Mastodon has Mastodon/<version> (athing; +https://<websitehere>) Friendica has Friendica/<version> +https://<website>

And many more other federated software have similar things. But when looking through my web request logs I'm not seeing any specific User Agent for NodeBB forums. The only one in fact that I've found which might be NodeBB is node-fetch.

I'm asking simply because I have a tool that monitors specifically for ActivityPub requests from various clients. And I'd like to be able to track NodeBB ActivityPub requests as well, but I'm not seeing how at the moment.

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Will this work?

ActivityPub

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Focused discussion related to ActivityPub integration in NodeBB

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