Following a category from the fediverse/social web
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The latest change to the ActivityPub integration for NodeBB introduces the concept of "group actors" to categories.
This change means that categories can be configured to be visible to other applications connected to the social web (including Mastodon, Misskey, and also other NodeBBs!)
When followed, it means that any post made to the category will be automatically shared to anyone who follows that category.
NodeBB already supported this locally. You could set your watch state for a particular category to "tracking" or "watching", the latter allowing you to be notified of new posts.
Also of note is that remote replies to topics contained within a category will also be shared to the category's followers. This distinction means that you can effectively follow a specific category or sub-category in order to stay up-to-date on all discussions within that category.
As of today, users cannot create topics in a category from the social web (e.g. I cannot create a new topic in a NodeBB category), yet. That will come soon.
For the NodeBB community forum, the following categories are followable for now:
Lastly, all of this follows the FEP-1b12 Group Federation enhancement proposal.
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I am very aware that one of the "holy grail" of fediverse applications seems to be private group discussions.
There's some R&D that needs to be done before we can even approach that — namely, post visibility controls — but this latest change lays the foundations toward that eventual goal.
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@julian That’s pretty cool!
One thing I’m not so clear about is how posts in sub-categories are treated. Say for example that someone on the NodeBB forum posts something to the @activitypub category. Since this is a sub-category of @nodebb-development, would I, someone on Mastodon, still see it if I follow the @nodebb-development category but not the @activitypub category?
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@julian i am very wary of encouraging the thinking that "if i see a type of Group, i assume it works according to 1b12" -- i strongly consider that to be a pitfall. the meaning of Group is more similar to a Group in vcard. you could use it for a musical collective or any other literal "group of individuals". given that any type can be an actor, i recommend making them Collections that can be followed. (yes, this is currently incompatible with mastodon, but we need to move past that)
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@[email protected] said:
recommend making them Collections that can be followed. (yes, this is currently incompatible with mastodon, but we need to move past that)
Yep, that's fine. None of this is finalized in any way.
Ideally it'd be a collection of topic objects, whatever form that ends up taking.
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@julian i am realizing i never actually typed up a FEP for this oops. but the gist of it is that you can have Collections of Collections. this also allows for modeling "sub-forums"/categories. Collections can also be heterogeneous and contain both topics and subforums. but that's an implementation detail -- you could also stick subforums in a dedicated property
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@[email protected], a far superior user experience would be sending a collection of topic-style objects, and the individual implementers would make them navigable, up and down, etc.
It may be a worthy goal for threadiverse apps to align on this sort of vision. The possibilities are there!
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@[email protected] said:
how posts in sub-categories are treated
The category hierarchy is strictly for visual organization, so categories themselves are only loosely related to one another by parent-child relationships.
Just like for local NodeBB users, following a "parent" category does not mean you implicitly follow the children too.
I agree that that can be confusing, but it's explicitly simpler in other ways.
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@julian Forgive me, but finding previous posts on Masto is always an annoying challenge. Refresh me on where the best place to ask you or Baris questions re NBB? The chat, or the topic categories? (which I will be calling “Sections” for years to come
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@[email protected] feel free to just tag me in a new toot. When NodeBB encounters a Note that it hasn't seen before it'll resolve it back up to the root and make a topic in the Uncategorized category. If you mention me, I'll be notified, just like on Mastodon.
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@julian I was logged into nodebb.org and our own instance. I just got this when I reactivated tab with comm. nodebb.org. That seems like unwanted behavior when logged into two nbb instances. cc @Green_Footballs
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@[email protected] no, multi-tenancy is not available in NodeBB at this time. Each installation is tied to one canonical domain.
There has been scattered interest for something like that over the years but not enough to justify the maintenance burden, sorry.
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@julian Okay, figured. What about group-controlled categories (to use your term for section). Or at least some form of member moderated subforum, ala Reddit. Is that doable now? (Still haven’t dived too deep on docs. That’s tomorrow).
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@julian Have you seen the implementation of private groups in Streams? It is based on the Conversation Containers https://fediversity.site/help/develop/en/Containers
I'll probably use this model in my project.(There's is comment about it from @mikedev but for some reason it didn't arrive to your server)
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@bh4-tech using latest stable NodeBB, you cannot yet. This is something on a separate development branch that is not cleared for production usage (though that didn't stop me from using it here
)I'll put together a guide next week for administrators interested in trying out the branch.
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@julian said in Following a category from the fediverse/social web:
@[email protected] no, multi-tenancy is not available in NodeBB at this time. Each installation is tied to one canonical domain.
There has been scattered interest for something like that over the years but not enough to justify the maintenance burden, sorry.
Is this about running a second NodeBB forum using the same database?
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Currently, you can add individual users as moderators for each categories/sub-categories from ACP > Manage > Admins & Mods , but I believe you cannot assign a group as moderators for now...
