I've just installed a new instance of NodeBB and it works beautifully. Some questions:

1. Is it possible for categories to follow Lemmy communities in their sync settings? I seem to be able to follow Lemmy communities, but the categories are stuck on pending.
2. Same for NodeBB categories. Can I sync my own category with remote NodeBB categories?

Edit: the URLs stuck on pending are giving "invalid-id" errors in the log. As in invalid activitypub ids. I pasted the URLs of some Lemmy communities and NodeBB categories.

Edit 2: Found the topic about this. https://community.nodebb.org/post/102818

@[email protected]

1. Is currently outstanding: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5354

2. You should be able to do this, although I may have to double check the logic. There have been reports that it is not working as expected.

@[email protected] said in NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!:

I'm wondering, as a stopgap solution, would it make sense to have some kind of rules engine that allows topics coming in from the fediverse to automatically be moved to NodeBB categories? Kind of like a somewhat less elegant sync.

Edit: like automatically assigning incoming topics based on tags seems like a particularly easy solution?

@julian great job!

@julian

@julian I read this whole thing wondering how NodeBB posts would look from my instance and then clicked your link at the end and realized I'd been reading one the whole time lol. Super cool, hope this takes off!

@[email protected] thanks for the suggestion, that's definitely something I'd want to consider.

Sort of a post queue for federated content that needs automatic or manual review before it is automatically slotted in a category.

@[email protected] Thanks. Even something as simple as mappin topic tags to categories automatically would work I think.

@[email protected] careful with that though, not all tags are the same, some have a higher signal-to-noise ratio, but others would just be filled with garbage

@julian so cool, can't wait to upgrade my nodebb forum to V4 (I'm exclusively on mobile for a few days)

@[email protected] said in NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!:

@[email protected] careful with that though, not all tags are the same, some have a higher signal-to-noise ratio, but others would just be filled with garbage

I think the best way, then, would be to have rules that map various group actor URLs to categories, and possibly also tags. Nothing automatic. Only configured. Of course, once Lemmy fixes the ability of Group actors to follow other Group actors, this will be a non-issue.

One other possible solution, which is employed by Misskey et al., is a proxy actor. It's a special user that follows other users, and relays info within its own instance. It's used for doing things like adding a remote user to a list without directly following them. The proxy account follows the user, and then your local instance adds the remote user to your list. But all ActivityPub interactions go through the proxy user.

If you have deployed NodeBB v4, and you updated to v4.0.1, please update now to v4.0.2 which fixes a regression that silently broke outgoing user follows.

@[email protected] said in NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!:
Do we need need to refollow?

@[email protected] if you browse to the account it will show as unfollowed, so you will need to refollow, yes.

@julian
Upgrading to 4.02 tonight. Let's see how it federates. Congrats and thank you for your work.

@julian I've been unable to get AP following to work in either direction. I mean it is sometimes possible to follow somebody and get followed by other sites, but no actual posts ever come into or out of my nodebb instance (forum.n66.pl). The only thing that works is importing posts directly by entering their URL in the search area, which is also temperamental – sometimes the same post can be imported and sometimes it can't. I also tried following people from individual categories. It never worked except for one instance where it seems to have been stuck with a "pending" message, but I have no way of accepting or rejecting the follow request on the other side (it should be accepted automatically). Sometimes the same happens when entering followed people's URLs in the search panel. Looking forward to fixes.

@julian It is interesting to see long form content in the Fediverse. I'm still not used to it.

Pretty cool.

@[email protected] This is done now, consecutive shares are merged.