CWSmith not right now, no. A category can only follow other accounts that identify themselves as "Group". This is to take advantage of synchronization logic that regular users don't supply (and even then not all groups do either).

However I'll keep this workflow in mind, it's an interesting idea!

I need this too. Ok, my idea is to create an category. Example "Linux". Now i follow some people, example @linuxfoundation@social.lfx.dev And then all Posts will show in my category. Please add this.

frankm@linux-nerds.org the reason why I'm hesitant about this is because allowing a category to follow a user bakes in the assumption that everything the user posts is relevant.

If you're following something like the linux foundation that's a pretty safe bet for a Linux category, but what if you follow a user and they start sharing or posting about unrelated things, like what they had for breakfast, etc.?

That's where things could get messy.

But, I absolutely love the idea of creating a category and making it sort of like a curated channel based around one idea.

This is the kind of cool stuff I want to see!

julian@community.nodebb.org

Perhaps as a compromise, you shouldn't follow a user, but instead follow hashtags that match the topic of the category.

frankm@linux-nerds.org this is now done. Turns out I wasn't actually stopping a category from following a user, so that didn't need rolling back.

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13232

hamiller@forum.wedistribute.org using a hashtag is probably also something I should allow categories to follow, although that's local-only to the instance because of how hashtags work.

Either way I didn't want to restrict a valid use case

julian I have the same hesitations around having categories follow user accounts. Most users are not categories, and they do not post categorically.

But some are. Satire accounts. Bot accounts. Institutional accounts, as you've called out. These are fairly safe bets, and it would be nice to allow admins the choice to roll the dice.

But another paradigm to explore is lists, and there are a number of ways to represent those. /world could be reconfigured into /feed (stepping on the toes of the Feeds plugin), with users being able to create arbitrary feeds for themselves.

Or lists could be represented as user-created pseudo-categories, given the UX of a forum category, but being personal to the user. They could be presented in /world exclusively, or appended to the bottom of the user's categories list.

Forum-wide lists could be considered, creating global pseudo-categories defined by admins or moderators, with a slightly modified layout and/or visual language.

This is really the transformation of a long standing medium. There's a huge possibility and design space here.

julian

No problem.

In my head I was thinking of a Federated account like a WordPress blog that has ActivityPub installed and confirmed working. Everyone in the Fediverse can see it, but having it followed and posted in Forum puts it there in front of the Community for a more direct conversation.

I am gonna start installing and trying to figure out ActivityPub into my Drupal projects even if I am not thrilled with my previous dealings with that module.

julian Are categories supposed to follow regular users from this screen in admin panel. Asking this because I tried putting a mastodon user profile link in the textbox but upon clicking on 'Follow' nothing happened. For threads, the request is pending(with some error, I guess) as you can see from the picture.

bh4-tech can you supply the URLs you tried to follow please?

julian https://www.threads.net/@khabydistas on threads and https://mastodon.social/@dansup on mastodon

bh4-tech might be not working because I did not expect urls. Can you try a handle like dansup@mastodon.social?

julian Yeah that worked for mastodon, but not for threads. Guess that's some problem on thread's side and not nodebb.

However, the remote media preview problem still remains https://community.nodebb.org/post/103782 . Guess you will need to cache remote media like misskey.

My first experience with Federation was with Calckey, (fork of Miskey.)
I liked some things about it, but there were forks of forks and I never knew in the end which variant of it was best to use

Hello

I am trying to follow some different ActivityPub group and users but

but I can't quite understand why some are accepted while others remain "pending."

For example, here I was able to follow the profile skariko@www.lealternative.net (who is an author of a Wordpress blog) and in fact his posts are posted in autonomous in the category correctly.

But if I try to follow another author of that blog like marcocalamari@www.lealternative.net or fediverso@www.lealternative.net it remains in “pending”.

I have also tried following two PeerTube users who both remain in “pending.”

Also after trying to unfollow one of the users it remains in “null.”

ska there is an issue with category sync with Lemmy, since they do not support categories following their communities.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5354

I'll have to take a closer look at Peertube.

Are you able to follow those users using your local account, not via the ACP?

julian Those are not Lemmy communities but authors of a federated Wordpress blog: the author skariko is followed while the authors marcocalamari and fediverso remain in “pending”.

On the other hand as far as PeerTube is concerned I just tried it and it did not give me any errors, in the next few days I will try to see if new posts also appear to me but it seems so: https://citiverse.it/category/framablog.audio@framatube.org

Thank you

Hi julian , and sorry for trying to resurrect this (somewhat old) thread I happened to read.
When you said to hamiller@forum.wedistribute.org

> "I should probably allow categories to track hashtag usage, even if it's local, given how hashtags work."

I thought this was now possible. In fact, I thought this was exactly what happens to your "General Discussion" category on Activitypub.space.

But then I looked in the settings of my federated NodeBB instance, and maybe it's not as I thought.
So, I wonder (and ask you): how do you manage to aggregate "general discussion" threads? Is there an automatic way, or do you do it manually with "move thread"?

informapirata indeed! This is configurable under the site-wide ActivityPub settings under "auto categorization rules".

For that site I have hashtags like "ActivityPub" and "fedimod" set up to automatically categorize discussions.

It only matches for discussions that don't already have a category of their own (so, microblog stuff.)

julian great!