ActivityPub

tl;dr — cross-posting is coming to NodeBB in v4.9.0. It will be internal-only for now, as we work through social issues with federated cross-posting. Existing category sync and auto-categorization logic in NodeBB now utilises cross-posts instead of moving or ignoring categorized topics, respectively.

Several people told me they couldn't figure out how to reply to a NodeBB conversation if they just had a link to the post, and yeah it is kind of non-obvious. So I decided to write something up on that as well as a few other quirks. Here's what I've got so far ... feedback welcome!

Just an idle thought... A common UX is users copying the URL in the address bar and pasting it into their fediverse app to load it in their app.

As I write this, I'm sitting on an airplane flying over the Canadian prairies on my way home from Vancouver, BC.

The only problematic account I have encountered so far is welcome@friends.deko.cloud but I have not tested many. On attempting to follow, it just hangs on “request pending”. I have been able to reliably follow the account from mastodon (for example).

This question was asked by mike@flipboard.social on Dot Social's latest episode about the blogosphere on Fedi.

In February 2025, I presented a topic at FOSDEM in Brussels entitled The Fediverse is Quiet — Let's Fix That! In it, I outlined several "hard problems" endemic to the fediverse, focusing on one particular complaint that is often voiced by newcomers and oldtimers alike; that the fediverse is quiet because you don't ever see the full conversation due to some design considerations made at the protocol level.

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.

I'm assuming Unicode in handles is not allowed? At least by Mastodon.

I'm wondering how content on threadiverse is automatically assigned its community when received by the software (e.g. PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin).

Does anybody know what exactly Pleroma needs for a valid Webfinger check? I'm attempting to figure out why @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social won't resolve in NodeBB, and it's because the webfinger call returns 400 Bad Request.

In my ever-continuing use of NodeBB as a single-user Fediverse instance, here are some things I've noticed. Both things I've already talked about before, and some new things. These are some suggestions for functionality or perhaps plugins.

Following up on this question I asked back in late March, I wanted to continue thinking about how one would handle cross-posting between categories/communities, given that there isn't current consensus on it, and especially given that NodeBB—as of v4.3.0—can now see and browse remote categories.