Updates to the world page
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I just realized that while we now have the ability to browse and follow remote communities, we don't have a page listing communities ordered by popularity or recency... time to add to my ever expanding list
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System shared this topic
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Is it also possible to add remote communities to the main forum list? Or merge them into existing local categories?
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Right now you're able to add remote categories to your world page. It's possible that we could allow admins to add remote categories to the forum index, although that'd be something we add later on.
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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
/worldroute, which up until now showed a list of topics from outside of the local NodeBB instance.New to this alpha release:
- 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.
- 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.
I'm seeing issues with loading remote categories. I can't load the NodeBB bug reports category at all, and for the ActivityPub category, I can find it in my world category search, but I get a 404 when trying to load it. Also can't load
general-discussion@community.nodebb.orgfor example.It seems the NodeBB development board is the only one really federating for me. Any way I can solve this?
I am running beta2 of 4.3.0.
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@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is hmm... could be a bug in the user migration code path.
Can you run your forum in dev mode (
./nodebb dev) and try to load some of the categories here in your forum, and let me know if you see any errors in the console? -
@julian@community.nodebb.org could not run it in dev mode directly because of docker compose, but did set
NODE_ENVtodevelopmentand got verbose logs. Only thing that shows up is:2025-05-03T19:35:59.553Z [4567/53] - warn: Route requested but not found: /category/activitypub@community.nodebb.org -
So, this URL does work: https://forum.agnos.is/category/nodebb-development@community.nodebb.org
Maybe it has something to do with the activitypub category being a sub-category of nodebb development?
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@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is no, that didn't matter. There is no concept of nested categories in ActivityPub yet.
But the issue seems legitimate, I can't access the ActivityPub category from a test Mastodon server either.
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@julian@community.nodebb.org I was able to access it from a Lemmy instance. So it is federating, at least partly. But interesting to know that Mastodon has issues with it...
One thing that might be helpful is that NodeBB gives an invalid ID error when trying to follow the category via the sync function in admin settings. Stack trace shows it's the error being thrown when trying to follow (activitypub.js line 43).
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@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is thanks, can you try again? For whatever reason the handle-to-cid association was lost, and I'm not sure why. I've manually restored it now.
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Yep, shows up now on my end. Maybe check other categories too?
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Were there other categories breaking?
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@julian@community.nodebb.org Yes, maybe? https://forum.agnos.is/category/bug-reports@community.nodebb.org for example. Maybe it's not federated? Since I don't see anything about what fediverse handle to use like in the ActivityPub forum.
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That's correct, that category wasn't federating, but it is now
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@julian@community.nodebb.org Cool, I can now load it. Another question: I have a bunch of lemmy communities (and also a few "null" entries) stuck on "pending" in the category synchronization settings. Pressing remote/delete doesn't do anything. Is there an easy way to get rid of them by editing the database?
Also, are there plans to merge the federation synchronization and new remote category following stuff together into one cohesive set of functionality?
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@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is said in Updates to the world page:
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> Also, are there plans to merge the federation synchronization and new remote category following stuff together into one cohesive set of functionality?Yes... the remote category functionality supercedes the category sync functionality in some ways, but there is still a use case for it.
Most likely I will need to develop proper support for cross-posting (at least locally), and that would work well with the remote category functionality, so that topics are cross-posted to the synchronized category, instead of moved.
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@julian@community.nodebb.org It would be good for outgoing posts if cross posting is used for synced categories. But it doesn't solve the problem of incoming posts. For that, it would make sense to still slot incoming posts based on the sync setup. But there is still the problem of Lemmy not accepting follows from category actors.
