Ein neuer Forumbeitrag: https://linux-nerds.org/topic/1708/nodebb-4.4.3-security-release #nodebb #linux

Le silence du #fediverse.

Quand le protocole #ActivityPub lui même donne une partie d'une conversation au lieu de tous les posts répondant au billet initial.

Réflexion sur comment y remédier:
https://hackers.pub/@hongminhee/2025/quiet-fediverse-two-approaches

By @hongminhee

#fediverse #fedidev #Mastodon #Pixelfed #conversations #NodeBB #Discourse, #WordPress #Frequency #Mitra #Streams #Lemmy #Piefed

Fun with Federation: Lemmy edition

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.

Observed behaviour showed that some remote categories would be receiving content in spurts, with long gaps in between.

I spent the next 3-4 days looking into it, but came up empty. Whatever was happening wasn't throwing any obvious errors, and along the way, I found what I thought was related (it was), but I wasn't sure why: against some Lemmy servers, the "follow"/"unfollow" mechanic would simply stop working, and this would often coincide with gaps in content. In some egregious cases, the flow of content stopped completely!

Unable to make headway, I had to reach out to the folks at Lemmy to figure out what the issue was. NodeBB occasionally sends non-200 level responses depending on the activity. Specifically, the following scenarios:

• A remote user upvoting more than 20 posts in a single day (a spam prevention tactic) causing NodeBB to throw an error, which was caught and returned an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.
• A Dislike activity, which is not currently handled by NodeBB. In these cases, NodeBB would send an HTTP 501 Not Implemented

When encountering either of these responses, Lemmy would return the activity back to the queue for later delivery and mark a delivery failure. If enough of these (~40) happened within 24 hours, Lemmy would give the instance a time-out and pause delivery completely.

That was it — a quick pair of code updates later, and we started working through Lemmy's backlog of 4.1M activities.

As of 4am this morning, community.nodebb.org is no longer behind lemmy.world.

Fun week. Let's not do that again LOL.

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104760

Topic thumbnails, uploads, and media display

There have been some scattered feedback on a change I made for v4.0.0 that caught some people off-guard: Uploaded media is now shown in addition to topic thumbnails.

I'll start with why this change was made, and then solicit feedback.

The why

v4.0.0 introduced ActivityPub integration into NodeBB. This added dimension meant that content was consumed in a manner that was similar, but unfamiliar to NodeBB, and so much of the work involved normalizing that data into a format that made sense. (As an aside, I tell people that that's pretty much 99% of my job — glueing together APIs. I jest, but it's also basically true.)

One of those unfamiliar aspects was uploaded media in the form of attachments. NodeBB had discrete concepts of inline media and topic thumbnails, but attachments were something different entirely. Attachments were not inlined in the text (they tended to be added before or after the main content), and thumbnails were images only, while attachments could be lots of other things.

The second part was that a lot of the content I received relied on media to do the heavy lifting. Oftentimes the text would be minimal and in response to the attachment. After all, a picture's worth a thousand words.

Given those two things, I allowed NodeBB to consume and store attachments separately, and updated the topic thumbnail retrieval logic to pull media from both post attachments and inline media. That retrieval logic is what governs what you see next to the title. I also decided on the all-in approach because while NodeBB has multiple ways of slotting media, majority of ActivityPub software generally only uses attachments. This means both inline media and topic thumbnails were unceremoniously shoved into attachments when federating outward. There is movement toward changing this, and so this rationale may no longer make sense today.

I initially did have concerns that perhaps this would dilute the meaning and specificity of the "topic thumbnail", but I also wagered that the UX improvement of promoting any and all media found would be of greater benefit.

Your turn — feedback!

Maybe I'm wrong!

• Perhaps the media row is best used to showcase topic thumbnails and post attachments only (not inlined media.)
• Perhaps a configurable option would appease all folks (although I'm usually loathe to add options purely for that reason.)

https://community.nodebb.org/post/104604

Ein neuer Forumbeitrag: https://linux-nerds.org/topic/1692/nodebb-4.3.0 #nodebb #linux

Un servidor #NodeBB amb més de 2,2 milions d'usuaris, és el segon més gran del #fedivers després de mastodon.social.

https://new.fedidb.org/servers/community.sketchucation.com

Ein neuer Forumbeitrag: https://linux-nerds.org/topic/1691/nodebb-4.2.2 #nodebb #linux

Started to look at what modern forums look like now. Besides #discourse.

#nodebb is nice. Somewhat simple. #nodejs, #redis, and #mongodb.

#flarum is very intuitive. #php and #mariadb. Runs light and smooth.

Flarum liking for simplicity. Although nodebb has fediverse magic.

Ah cool @baris fixed one of the #NodeBB bugs I filed in February!
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13205#event-17094664390

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 /world route, which up until now showed a list of topics from outside of the local NodeBB instance.

New to this alpha release:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Eigentlich wollte ich keine ActivityPub Software mehr testen!

Eigentlich wollte ich keine #ActivityPub Software mehr testen, aber dann habe ich gesehen das #NodeBB jetzt auch das #ActivityPub Protokoll unterstützt. Also werde ich das wohl mal die nächsten Tage testen.

Für die, die auch mal die Anbindung testen wollen habe ich an eine Test-Kategorie angelegt

@fediverse-verbindung-test

Die Kategorie funktioniert wie eine Friendica Gruppen !fediverse-verbindung-test@nodebb.sekbaer.de

Today I learned that #PieFed has RSS feeds for at least Topics and Communities.

That community one is a hoot - PieFed, serving up a #NodeBB forum as an RSS feed. ActivityPub is bonkers.

https://piefed.social/topic/fediverse.rss

https://piefed.social/community/activitypub@community.nodebb.org/feed

Exciting community updates! 2TonWaffle is evolving with a clearer focus for both our main site and Indie Creator Hub. We're fully embracing the #Fediverse with #ActivityPub integration through #NodeBB and #Ghost platforms, making our content more accessible and connected than ever. Learn about our streaming plans on #Moonbeam and our vision for a more streamlined 2025!
https://2tonwaffle.com/platform-clarity-streamlining-the-2tonwaffle-ecosystem/
#IndieGaming #CreatorCommunity #CommunityBuilding