NodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance

> that user and the category are (I think) separate actors.

@julian Yes, they are indeed separate actors. To be clear, [Tech News by @theverge@flipboard.com](https://community.nodebb.org/category/tech-news-theverge@flipboard.com) is the group actor, while @theverge@flipboard.com is the person actor/remote user, sorry if I caused any confusion.

> I'm not sure what the user does, shares its own posts, possibly...

As I understand Flipboard, users there can create as many magazines as they want, and any post they create must always be in a magazine. It is not possible to create a post that does not belong to a magazine.

When federating this means that each magazine that a user creates is discoverable as @-@flipboard.com; any post that user creates will tag the magazine the post was made into, and the group actor representation of that magazine will boost/share/announce the post.

@julian Yeah, seems to just affect Flipboard.

> Can you find those items when you search their url or id in the NodeBB search bar?

Yes, I'm still able to find them, e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/post/https%3A%2F%2Fflipboard.com%2Fusers%2Ftheverge%2Fstatuses%2FDpM9mVh1Qk2oScowFAN8DA%3Aa%3A43611565

It's uncategorised, just as you said.

Slight tangent, no one seems to be following @theverge@flipboard.com at all though.

@julian Something seems to be wrong. I've been following a few Flipboard magazines from NodeBB, but it seems like they are not correctly federating with the 4.3.0 beta.

Take a look at [Tech News by @theverge@flipboard.com](https://community.nodebb.org/category/tech-news-theverge@flipboard.com), I've been tracking this remote category for almost a month now, but here on NodeBB, it is still empty. Meanwhile, on Mastodon I see new posts daily.

For the record, this is what an activity created by the group actor looks like:

{
   "type":"Announce",
   "id":"https://flipboard.com/magazines/cPVtLWiDRgi0_eWFp_CJVA:m:43611565/activity/DpM9mVh1Qk2oScowFAN8DA:a:43611565",
   "actor":"https://flipboard.com/magazines/cPVtLWiDRgi0_eWFp_CJVA:m:43611565",
   "published":"2025-04-22T09:44:54Z",
   "to":[
      "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
   ],
   "cc":[
      "https://flipboard.com/users/theverge",
      "https://flipboard.com/magazines/cPVtLWiDRgi0_eWFp_CJVA:m:43611565/followers"
   ],
   "object":"https://flipboard.com/users/theverge/statuses/DpM9mVh1Qk2oScowFAN8DA:a:43611565"
}

This is getting out of hand! Now, there are six of them!

Actually, I think I know what's going on with the Vivaldi blog group actor - it's not necessarily NodeBB's fault.

Inspecting the AP objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog, all the English-written blog posts have their as:audience field set to https://vivaldi.com/?author=0.

Meanwhile, every other blog post that is written in a different language instead have it set to https://vivaldi.com//?author=0, so for Japanese blog posts, for example, it is https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=0.

And all these URLs link to different group actors, but all of them have the same value on the preferredUsername and webfinger properties: blog, and blog@vivaldi.com.

EDIT: Actually this also appears to be all actor objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog. E.g. if you start typing [@ruari@vivaldi.com](https://community.nodebb.org/user/ruari%40vivaldi.com) or search for it, you can see it be suggested twice too.

So my guess is that there are two person actors that NodeBB knows of that are claiming to be ruari@vivaldi.com: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46 and https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46.

This is probably a bug with the WPML+ActivityPub plugin combination they have going on.

Screenshots

It looks like they are indeed AP groups: https://community.nodebb.org/category/gear-engadget@flipboard.com

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories:
> That might get a little hairy if you follow a lot of categories.

I did not consider that, you're right

Though if I wasn't clear, what I'm hoping to see is a page similar to the /categories page, but instead of listing local categories, it lists all the remote categories you are following, or to use NodeBB parlance, "tracking".

Perhaps a /world/categories page? So in addition to being able to "pin" them to /world, you can also quickly find all your other watched remote categories there.

Additionally, maybe you could also have a dedicated page for all the remote categories NodeBB is currently aware of, like the /recent?cid=-1 page.

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories:
> Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

My thinking was that all the remote categories you follow are listed in your /world page - as opposed to being mixed alonside your followed accounts in your /user//following page.

But being able to pin the ones you most care about actually sounds good too.

For some reason, I'm unable to view the profile page of certain remote accounts here at community.nodebb.org.

So far, I've only noticed it with some accounts from my Mastodon instance - particularly, my own account, @AltCode@social.vivaldi.net, and the @Vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net account, which should be viewable at https://community.nodebb.org/user/altcode@social.vivaldi.net and https://community.nodebb.org/user/vivaldi@social.vivaldi.net respectively. Instead, trying to go to either of those profile pages produces a 404 error; it's weird though, because these accounts used to work fine before.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to report this. I considered creating an issue on the GitHub repo, but at the moment I have no idea if it can affect accounts from other instances (let alone, other activitypub software), or only those from social.vivaldi.net.