Fun with Federation: Lemmy edition

It all started with a report about federation breaking between Lemmy and NodeBB. I was subconsciously aware that something was going on, but had chalked it up to network issues.

Observed behaviour showed that some remote categories would be receiving content in spurts, with long gaps in between.

I spent the next 3-4 days looking into it, but came up empty. Whatever was happening wasn't throwing any obvious errors, and along the way, I found what I thought was related (it was), but I wasn't sure why: against some Lemmy servers, the "follow"/"unfollow" mechanic would simply stop working, and this would often coincide with gaps in content. In some egregious cases, the flow of content stopped completely!

Unable to make headway, I had to reach out to the folks at Lemmy to figure out what the issue was. NodeBB occasionally sends non-200 level responses depending on the activity. Specifically, the following scenarios:

• A remote user upvoting more than 20 posts in a single day (a spam prevention tactic) causing NodeBB to throw an error, which was caught and returned an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.
• A Dislike activity, which is not currently handled by NodeBB. In these cases, NodeBB would send an HTTP 501 Not Implemented

When encountering either of these responses, Lemmy would return the activity back to the queue for later delivery and mark a delivery failure. If enough of these (~40) happened within 24 hours, Lemmy would give the instance a time-out and pause delivery completely.

That was it — a quick pair of code updates later, and we started working through Lemmy's backlog of 4.1M activities.

As of 4am this morning, community.nodebb.org is no longer behind lemmy.world.

Fun week. Let's not do that again LOL.

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104760

The backlog was bigger than I expected...

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104734

Topic thumbnails, uploads, and media display

There have been some scattered feedback on a change I made for v4.0.0 that caught some people off-guard: Uploaded media is now shown in addition to topic thumbnails.

I'll start with why this change was made, and then solicit feedback.

The why

v4.0.0 introduced ActivityPub integration into NodeBB. This added dimension meant that content was consumed in a manner that was similar, but unfamiliar to NodeBB, and so much of the work involved normalizing that data into a format that made sense. (As an aside, I tell people that that's pretty much 99% of my job — glueing together APIs. I jest, but it's also basically true.)

One of those unfamiliar aspects was uploaded media in the form of attachments. NodeBB had discrete concepts of inline media and topic thumbnails, but attachments were something different entirely. Attachments were not inlined in the text (they tended to be added before or after the main content), and thumbnails were images only, while attachments could be lots of other things.

The second part was that a lot of the content I received relied on media to do the heavy lifting. Oftentimes the text would be minimal and in response to the attachment. After all, a picture's worth a thousand words.

Given those two things, I allowed NodeBB to consume and store attachments separately, and updated the topic thumbnail retrieval logic to pull media from both post attachments and inline media. That retrieval logic is what governs what you see next to the title. I also decided on the all-in approach because while NodeBB has multiple ways of slotting media, majority of ActivityPub software generally only uses attachments. There is movement toward changing this, and so this rationale may no longer make sense today.

I initially did have concerns that perhaps this would dilute the meaning and specificity of the "topic thumbnail", but I also wagered that the UX improvement of promoting any and all media found would be of greater benefit.

Your turn — feedback!

Maybe I'm wrong!

• Perhaps the media row is best used to showcase topic thumbnails and post attachments only (not inlined media.)
• Perhaps a configurable option would appease all folks (although I'm usually loathe to add options purely for that reason.)

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104604

Wix Forums being sunset, what's next?

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104254

Ah cool @baris fixed one of the #NodeBB bugs I filed in February!
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13205#event-17094664390

tl;dr — you can now find remote categories and see your tracked/watched categories in /world.

A new alpha version of NodeBB was tagged today: v4.3.0-alpha.3. The biggest change is to the /world route, which up until now showed a list of topics from outside of the local NodeBB instance.

New to this alpha release:

1. A quick search widget was added, allowing you to directly search for remote categories. There is no need to navigate to to the search page to discover new categories.
2. Your list of tracked and watched categories will show at the top of the page.
   • "Tracking" and "Watching" categories—both local and remote—is how content discovery happens in NodeBB. Tracked categories will have new content show up in the "unread" page, while watched categories take that a step further and notify you when new content is posted.
   • Tracking and watching a category will tell NodeBB to subscribe to that remote community for updates

At this time we're continuing to look for stability issues with the remote category integration. We'll be working on QoL fixes as we move into the beta phase this/next week.

Today I learned that #PieFed has RSS feeds for at least Topics and Communities.

That community one is a hoot - PieFed, serving up a #NodeBB forum as an RSS feed. ActivityPub is bonkers.

https://piefed.social/topic/fediverse.rss

https://piefed.social/community/activitypub@community.nodebb.org/feed

Exciting community updates! 2TonWaffle is evolving with a clearer focus for both our main site and Indie Creator Hub. We're fully embracing the #Fediverse with #ActivityPub integration through #NodeBB and #Ghost platforms, making our content more accessible and connected than ever. Learn about our streaming plans on #Moonbeam and our vision for a more streamlined 2025!
https://2tonwaffle.com/platform-clarity-streamlining-the-2tonwaffle-ecosystem/
#IndieGaming #CreatorCommunity #CommunityBuilding

@baris

I'm an excited user about the fediverse that was testing out try.nodebb.org and did some tests and liked it!

Even this is sort of a test but also a post about myself being a "NodeBB User", a federated user.

Perhaps the line gets blurred when we are all in the fediverse.

I've been impressed so far by NodeBB and only recently *also* realized you are a FLOSS GPLv3 project.

My emotional state: speechless

Forget ghost!

NodeBB is not only FLOSS, it's also a great federated forum software!

Just look up julian@community.nodebb.org

This is a profile on NodeBB but you can watch so many posts and if you select

"Open original page"

it will take you to the forum and make Mastodon and the fedi look nice!

I feel like NodeBB could be the next Mastodon!

It's amazing!

Hello all

Today we're releasing NodeBB v4.2.0. Most of the changes pertain to minor updates to our existing ActivityPub integration.

• Categories can now follow regular users
  • v4 launched with the ability for NodeBB to synchronize categories with other "group" type remote accounts. While it was possible to follow regular users, their content did not properly load into the category. This has now been fixed.
• Actual handling (not just pretend ) of content from Ghost
• Added button to view original profile of remote users
• Better handling of content for remote chat messages (non-public notes)
• Forking and moving posts between topics now announced by the category
• Separate chat message length cutoff for remote messages
• Improved link handling on remote content
• Categories now have a handle in the description; added an additional setting for a remote-only addendum for local categories

The "View Original" button for user profiles is located in the sidebar of any remote user profile:

Hey, fediverse, I'm curious about following NodeBB accounts from Mastodon. Has anyone successfully done so?

Please, upvote this request for #NodeBB developers to improve the way they handle user #consent around #Fediverse profiles interaction with search engines.

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13223

We just released version 4.1.0 of NodeBB. Here are the latest features you can now take advantage of!

As an aside, for the first time in a long while, both @baris and I are working on the same codebase again. Up until version 4 was released, I'd been working on the activitypub branch and periodically merging in the latest changes from develop. It's nice to be home!

Improved federation of Group actors

We've improved the activity synchronization for followed group actors. Local updates/likes/etc. are now federated outward by the category in addition to those from remote users. Thanks to @rimu@piefed.social and @freamon who worked with me on debugging this one.

Mentions and Emoji now federating out in source.content

Emoji and mentions have been sent out to followers since v4, but that wasn't reflected in the raw markdown content that we also send along. That has been remediated now, and this change improves nodebb-to-nodebb federation.

Video object type now parseable

NodeBB is now able to ingest Peertube Video objects, and render then in a topic just like other pieces of content.

We received word recently that one of our long-standing clients, NFC Ring, is planning to shut down their forum toward the end of the month. While this is normally a sad time, it's worth mentioning that NFC Ring has been hosting their forum with NodeBB for over ten years! They've been with us just about as long as our self-serve hosting service has been, along with all of our ups and downs over the years.

Their forum contained a couple custom integrations, along with the earliest known NodeBB SSO plugin, and had a custom theme at one point as well.

These innovators envisioned the idea of paying for groceries with the tap of a ring years before that technology became ubiquitous. Super cool.

Nevertheless, their trust in us (a dinky little company in 2013) did not go unnoticed, and we wish them the best!

Hey @dansup@mastodon.social, can I poke you about getting NodeBB on FediDB?

It automatically picked up a couple NodeBB sites, so I think the nodeinfo stuff is working, just not sure if it required some manual intervention on your end to get the software link working — it currently 404s.

Cheers :flag-ca:

Okay, what the hell just caused that big uptick in #Fediverse MAUs?

Was it John Oliver? Was it #NodeBB? Was there some drama happening on another platform that resulted in a migration here?

Please tell me if you have the answers.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/4010e7a5-6754-4ae5-9f6e-00cac5aa7a63