Lemmy and NodeBB

[email protected]

I’ve been playing around with community.nodebb.org, in anticipation of 4.0’s launch, and I’ve noticed that the Lemmy groups I’ve followed don’t appear to be showing up. I can see posts from Mastodon (and whatever else) users that I’ve followed in World, but not Lemmy groups.

Is this expected or intended? Following nodeBB topics from Lemmy has worked OK, so I thought it would be bidirectional.

Though, now that I’m comparing this post on lemmy.ca to that on the mothership, I see that replies from nodebb.org users aren’t showing up on the remote instance, either. Just those from off-site users. I’m caught somewhat off guard by that, too. Is that behaviour expected?

julian

@[email protected] whether replies from here appear on lemmy.ca depends on whether a user from lemmy.ca follows a user here. Perhaps that isn't the case? (Hopefully you see this reply now )

Still need to debug Lemmy federation. Might be a regression.

Kichae

@julian said in NodeBB v4.0.0 Beta:

whether a user from lemmy.ca follows a user here

Hmm. That's going to be a big issue for Lemmy federation, then, because Lemmy doesn't even allow you to follow users, only groups. If that's the case, this seems like a deeper compatibility issue, and probably is probably more of a feature update than a bug fix.

julian

@Kichae @[email protected] That's an issue with all software federating via ActivityPub. If there isn't an existing follow relationship then the content isn't pushed to that user.

That's greatly simplifying it, of course. There's quite a bit more that actually goes into how it works.

In the case of the referenced topic, NodeBB automatically boosts replies that it receives from the category actor. When replies are made by NodeBB users, they are also addressed to everybody who has participated in the topic.

So given that, lemmy.ca should have received everything, at least since you started posting in it. In reality, there might be a connection issue between NodeBB and Lemmy, and that's what I'd want to verify first.

Kichae

No, I understand, it's just that I am following the group actors. I'm following the Lemmy communities from here, but new posts from them aren't arriving. I'm following the nodeBB topics from Lemmy, but nodeBB user comments aren't showing up there.

Lemmy only supports following group actors. So, Lemmy communities, gup.pe groups, PeerTube channels, NodeBB topics, etc. If NodeBB's federation is reliant specifically on following users, that represents a fundamental difference in the federation models between the platforms.

julian

@Kichae no the group actors are fine too. We implement the same sharing system that Lemmy implements.

Kichae

Hmm, ok. Unexpected and unintended interactions (or lack there of) it is, then. Fun!

Edit: This comment, FWIW, showed up in Lemmy right away. So, whatever the issue with on-site comments not federating out seems to have been resolved. If no active intervention was taken, it may have been an issue with Lemmy 0.19.3 (lemmy.ca just updated the other day to 0.19.7, IIRC), or it may have just been federation queue issues.

Edit Edit: I love that federated comment chains can be forked without breaking federation. That's awesome.

julian

@Kichae the forking is local only. There's no standard way to communicate a fork action across to other instances.

We'll try to be pioneers and come up with a way though!

Kichae

I was worried that forking just wouldn't be supported on federated topics, or that if a posted was forked, it would break federation. So, this is incredible. This is what I've been waiting 2 and a half years for.

julian

@Kichae yeah let's say a topic is forked in NodeBB. The baseline expectation is that federation doesn't break, but the ideal is that the fork is also federated so Lemmy (for example) would also fork the topic on their end, so it looks the same on either end.

Something we'd want to work on with ForumWG (specifically @[email protected])