I didn't want to go as far as allowing categories to follow individual actors, because categories are for topical discussion and individual users tend to be less focused on a single topic.

So categories can follow other Group actors only. That is by design.

However, a category is an actor, and anybody can follow it. They just need to know the handle, which is set in the admin panel and by default is usually the same as the "slug", which is the human readable bit in the url. e.g. "General Discussion"'s slug is general-discussion. I do have to expose this to the frontend, though. It is not immediately apparent this is so.

Share your thoughts in this GitHub issue opened by @panos@catodon.social https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13126

@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org

@julian@community.nodebb.org Yep, that makes sense. I believe that both our WordPress site and PeerTube channels are technically Group Actors, though I will have to revisit that.

I just think it would be interesting to use ActivityPub to automatically submit posts to our various categories, such as our podcast automatically posting to a Podcast category, or our news articles about the Fediverse to appear as forum submissions under the Fediverse category.

The effect of this would be that Actors could automatically have content announced to various groups in a native way, so Lemmy or PieFed or MBin users subscribed to @fediverse@forum.wedistribute.org would see that content as submissions that could be upvoted or interacted with.

@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org Any user (of any type) can submit posts to a category. They need only mention the category.

e.g. Mention @testing-ground here, and when received by NodeBB, it should automatically be slotted in that category.

@julian I just ran into this. I guessed that the 'shortname' for https://forum.wedistribute.org/category/6/the-decentered-podcast would be 'the-decentered-podcast' but trying to fetch !the-decentered-podcast@forum.wedistribute.org didn't work, because it's actually just 'decentered'. I don't think that there's a way for anybody just looking at HTML representation to know this.

@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org
I just looked at your wedistribute.org website, and it looks great
What software / system are you using for that main page?

@freamon open to suggestions on how to expose this to the end user.

If accessing the content from fedi the handle is irrelevant, since it's part of the AP actor payload.

I'll admit I didn't really consider the use case of someone accessing the forum directly and looking for the handle to follow.

@julian I like how PeerTube does it. Looking at https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos, for example, there's 2 intersecting squares next to the channel name, and clicking that puts the handle into my clipboard, for pasting into the box that I can then use on my instance to fetch it.

@julian @panos @deadsuperhero

Hi there! I'm sure this will be a very stupid question, but...

I recently got to federate my #NodeBB forum, and I can see and follow my user there @xbermusic@piano.cat , send messages and so on, so far so great.

I'd like to follow categories from the forum, but even when there is a handle for it ("proves" in the screenshot) I can't get to find not follow @proves@piano.cat

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks a lot!

Hi @xbermusic@mastodont.cat, can you check the category privileges and ensure that the fediverse pseudo-user has all of the privileges available to it, specifically "Find Category" and "Access Category"?

@julian hi! Yes, permissions seem to be ok.

I had some issues because the domain pointed to the correct IP, but it didn't point back to the domain, but now that seems to be solved.

Should I delete and create again the categories or maybe turn off federation and turn it on again on them?

Thanks!

@xbermusic@mastodont.cat are you still unable to find categories?

@julian hi! Unfortunately not.

I made a post making the categories expecting that somehow I could follow them from Mastodon.

I used the handle @anuncis and that created a link with this: https://piano.cat/category/1/anuncis, but opening it from Mastodon doesn't lead to a pseudo-user but the category in my forum.