NodeBB receives NLNet NGI0 Core Grant

julian

We're happy to announce that NodeBB has applied for and been greenlit for a grant from the NLNet Foundation under the NGI Core Zero program!

Astute observers may have noticed that between May and August, a branch with a corresponding draft pull request was opened, purporting to bring ActivityPub integration to NodeBB. This was some initial R&D and investigation into whether the idea had merit, and soon afterwards, we applied in the August call for applications for the NGI Core Zero grant program.

tl;dr

In this project, the team will be working on bringing ActivityPub integration to NodeBB, in order to allow forums to become truly interconnected with other ActivityPub-enabled applications throughout the wider Fediverse (of course including other NodeBB forums). The absolute hardest part of starting a community — forum or otherwise — is gaining a critical mass of adoption in order to sustain interest and content. What if we could bypass this hurdle altogether?

In other words, we hope to solve a common problem with forum software and community building in general: how can we lower the activation energy of a community launch, and jumpstart community growth? Often times, starting a forum is a lonely endeavour. You run head-first into the chicken-and-egg problem: You have no posts, because you have no users, and users don't join because you don't have any posts.

Different strategies have been used over the years to combat this. Some admins choose to set up plugins to automatically convert RSS feed entries into topics, others post prolifically and share links to their forum in the hopes that others will come check it out. Some less-than-honest admins probably even create many fake accounts in order to mimic a healthy community, when it is really just a single person talking to themselves .

The problem remains, however — it is hard to build a community from scratch!

What if this wasn't necessary? What if instead of building a closed-off island and hoping people settle down, we built bridges to every other island in the world?

This is where the ActivityPub protocol (and its interconnected network of sites, affectionately known as the Fediverse) comes in. With an ActivityPub-enabled NodeBB forum, you would be able to communicate with any other website that also implements the same protocol: Mastodon, Pixelfed, Firefish, and potentially Bluesky/Threads!

Users would be able to follow each other across different sites, and post/reply to each other without even needing to be on the same site. The possibilities for cross-communication are endless. Users would be able to be part of a larger network while simultaneously maintaining the individual quirks and niche content that makes forums strong.

With this grant, ActivityPub integration would become my main focus (and the main focus of NodeBB v4). It's a little early to talk timelines, but I'm ambitiously hoping to have something concrete to show within the first half of 2024.

Hey @julian, congrats on the grant! I've been building the official ActivityPub plugin for Discourse(https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794). To be clear, Pavilion (my cooperative) has been commissioned by CDCK (the company behind Discourse) to build it (I don't work for CDCK). With that throat clearing out of the way, I'd be keen to setup a test integration with your implementation when you're ready. Perhaps we could do it between a category here and a category on socialhub.activitypub.rocks, one of the primary ActivityPub forums? SocialHub is running both Discourse and the plugin (I'm also an admin there, which will help smooth things along). It'd be neat if we could get some NodeBB <> Discourse ActivityPub action happening.

julian

Thanks @Angus-McLeod! Will you be at this week's FediForum? We could chat then.

Might be a good idea to touch base about any potential link ups especially when we're talking about testing in-development code and public facing instances

waves

While this is very interesting would this be an opt-in system? Also how would integrating non ActivityPub users work

NodeBB receives NLNet NGI0 Core Grant

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