Hey @[email protected] I'm currently experimenting with a NodeBB setup that has ActivityPub enabled.

[deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org]

Hey @[email protected] I'm currently experimenting with a NodeBB setup that has ActivityPub enabled. I saw that documentation was a little bit sparse, and just wanted to expand my understanding.

I've seen NodeBB interact with different parts of the Fediverse. In my setup, I see that categories can follow existing Actors, such as profiles, blogs, and Lemmy Groups. Are categories themselves capable of being Actors in NodeBB?

We're kind of interested in maybe setting up a user community on We Distribute's infra, and integrating into the Threadiverse with Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, and everyone else. I'm just trying to understand capabilities and limitations.

[deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org]

@[email protected] Oh wow, I just saw that it automatically appeared on Lemmy after a few minutes. 🤯

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@[email protected] sorry for the delay! I'm vacationing in Mexico with the fam post-FOSDEM (not entirely my plan to make them back to back, but that's how things fell into place!)

Will respond separately to your original post.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@[email protected] said in Hey @[email protected] I'm currently experimenting with a NodeBB setup that has ActivityPub enabled.:
> I saw that documentation was a little bit sparse, and just wanted to expand my understanding.

Can you tell me more about which sections need fleshing out? Writing documentation is hard for technical folk like me, but if you let me know what exactly needs more detail, I will be happy to write something up. Also paging @panos, who might be able to do the heavy lifting on that one!!

[deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org]

@[email protected] Hey, no problem! I think the biggest stumbling block was understanding how federation works. For example, if my forum has ActivityPub enabled, and I create a category, do I have to do anything to fetch it from another platform?

The answer is that federation works automatically, and the category shortname is what's used for a federation lookup. So "announcements" becomes @[email protected].

It's mostly little things like that, spelling out the standard behavior and explaining outcomes. I'd be happy to contribute documentation as I continue to use NodeBB!

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

I didn't want to go as far as allowing categories to follow individual actors, because categories are for topical discussion and individual users tend to be less focused on a single topic.

So categories can follow other Group actors only. That is by design.

However, a category is an actor, and anybody can follow it. They just need to know the handle, which is set in the admin panel and by default is usually the same as the "slug", which is the human readable bit in the url. e.g. "General Discussion"'s slug is general-discussion. I do have to expose this to the frontend, though. It is not immediately apparent this is so.

Share your thoughts in this GitHub issue opened by @[email protected] https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13126

@[email protected]

[deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org]

@[email protected] Yep, that makes sense. I believe that both our WordPress site and PeerTube channels are technically Group Actors, though I will have to revisit that.

I just think it would be interesting to use ActivityPub to automatically submit posts to our various categories, such as our podcast automatically posting to a Podcast category, or our news articles about the Fediverse to appear as forum submissions under the Fediverse category.

The effect of this would be that Actors could automatically have content announced to various groups in a native way, so Lemmy or PieFed or MBin users subscribed to @[email protected] would see that content as submissions that could be upvoted or interacted with.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@[email protected] Any user (of any type) can submit posts to a category. They need only mention the category.

e.g. Mention @testing-ground here, and when received by NodeBB, it should automatically be slotted in that category.

[freamon@community.nodebb.org]

@julian I just ran into this. I guessed that the 'shortname' for https://forum.wedistribute.org/category/6/the-decentered-podcast would be 'the-decentered-podcast' but trying to fetch [email protected] didn't work, because it's actually just 'decentered'. I don't think that there's a way for anybody just looking at HTML representation to know this.

[eeeee@community.nodebb.org]

@[email protected]
I just looked at your wedistribute.org website, and it looks great
What software / system are you using for that main page?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@freamon open to suggestions on how to expose this to the end user.

If accessing the content from fedi the handle is irrelevant, since it's part of the AP actor payload.

I'll admit I didn't really consider the use case of someone accessing the forum directly and looking for the handle to follow.