Live testing of remote categories

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@Kichae @trwnh@mastodon.social I’d be interested in seeing some examples of as:Groups that aren’t better represented as a category vs a user.

I’m not saying that they don’t exist, just that I don’t know about them.

WP blogs are working well as categories although obviously posting to that remote category won’t actually get you anywhere. So the UX doesn’t work well on things like that.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian in common usage maybe not, but more generally then yes absolutely

i think the "category vs user" split can be rethought wrt actors, because as stated earlier the difference between a blog (category) and a forum (category) is basically nothing. you could just as easily treat every AP actor as both a category and a user; they are a user when they post and they are a category when you consider their posts. the thing is, right now, some actors primarily use only Announce, some use Create...

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian posting into a forum could be done with Create, and sharing something to your profile could be done with an Announce of your own object. you can't really tease the two apart. imagine a world where *every* actor published Announce Object. they are in some sense "sharing" the object into multiple contexts and each individual "share" can be tracked in the Object.shares collection

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian i think ideally this would be explicitly signalled which objects represented a Feed or Category or Forum or Account or User or whatnot. but the question is how to get from here to there...

[eeeee@community.nodebb.org]

The search worked, it found the community, but there was no subscribe option.
When I tapped the bar that says number of current subscribers an error page showed !?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@eeeee to subscribe to a category, you will want to watch or track it, same as you would a regular category.

You’re seeing that error because you’re off-site, onto Lemmy.

[eeeee@community.nodebb.org]

@julian can you be specific in how to track it?
Although Ive found it I cant seem to follow / track that community.
What do I do? Apologies if Im being stupid, but Ive tried

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@julian example using foaf and sioc...

```
id = f1
type = [as:Service, sioc:Forum]
as:summary = "Forum TF category"

id = g1
type = [as:Group, foaf:Group, foaf:Agent, sioc:User]
as:name = "AP Forum Task Force"
foaf:member = [Julian, a]

id = t1
type = [as:Collection, sioc:Thread]
as:summary = "Some thread"
sioc:has_container = f1

id = p1
type = [as:Event, sioc:Post]
as:name = "Meeting on April 2025"
sioc:has_container = t1
sioc:has_creator = g1
as:attributedTo = g1
```

[Gæst]

Nice, but does this mean accounts on NodeBB can no longer mention categories at all?

Perhaps this was not its intended purpose, but being able to link to a category in a post by a handle is much more convenient than typing its entire URL - and that goes for both remote and local categories.

So I am not talking about creating a topic on remote categories by mentioning them, but rather trying to bring attention to their existence to a person that might not know about them.

E.g.
> @test1 Hey, you might want to check out @testing-ground; there’s lots of awesome content there.

> @test1 If you want to make a report, consider posting this to @bug-reports instead.

---

N.B. In my examples, I’m actually still able to mention local categories via a handle - so I did not type [[@testing-ground](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground)](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground), simply [@testing-ground](/user/testing-ground%40community.nodebb.org).

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode I think being able to mention categories is handy. It was removed as a byproduct of the category no longer being a user, but it’s not gone by design, no. It can come back.

[kichae@community.nodebb.org]

@julian The way cross-posting works on Lemmy and Reddit is basically to copy the post, so there’s not necessarily a reason to break the one-to-one mapping of posts-to-categories. (Though, actually, looking at Reddit, I think it’s actually a new post with an internal link preview, rather than a wholesale copy of content as it is on Lemmy). But more advanced frameworks could be interesting

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@eeeee no problem, what seems straightforward for me isn’t always the case for others!

Below the category description, there is a bar that contains buttons for sorting the topic list. The first of those buttons controls whether you are watching or tracking the category. It usually corresponds to whether you see topics from that category in your unread and recent pages.

For remote categories, this controls whether or not you are following the category. If you are following the category, then topics posted in that category will show up in your unread page.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@trwnh@mastodon.social in general, if NodeBB discovers a group, it will create an (initially) empty category in order to house topics.

If in the course of that category’s life, no topics actually make it in (i.e. if nobody addresses anything to it, nobody follows it, etc.) then it’ll be pruned out as normal.

So if an as:Group contains users, and doesn’t share or send creates, then it’ll just be a little stub that goes nowhere, that’s all.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that while this theoretically works with software like PieFed and Mbin, it has only really been tested against NodeBB (of course) and Lemmy.

@andrew_s@piefed.social @rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz @melroy@kbin.melroy.org

[Gæst]

Some interesting bugs atm

All the ActivityPub groups I was following prior to this update were successfully migrated to become remote categories (good!), but now that they are no longer treated as remote users, this has left behind a bunch of “guest” users in my /following page.

Also due to the migration, a bunch of topics that used to be categorised under @activitypub, were automatically moved to [[@activitypub](https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub)@forum.wedistribute.org](https://community.nodebb.org/category/activitypub@forum.wedistribute.org)!

I presume this happened because [[@activitypub](https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub)@forum.wedistribute.org](https://community.nodebb.org/category/activitypub@forum.wedistribute.org) is set to mirror @activitypub. I’m guessing that since the group actor was sharing all these posts, once NodeBB recognised it as a remote category instead, it began to treating those share activities as move actions.

Seeing how NodeBB does not have a notion of topics belonging to multiple categories, you might want to revisit how you handle remote categories that follow and mirror local categories.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode thanks for reporting! I’ll take a look at those tomorrow.

The topics being moved out is a byproduct of the migration. Looks like some tweaking is in order! Perhaps I’ll only move topics whose main post is on the same domain.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode I’ve moved those topics back to the proper category

[eeeee@community.nodebb.org]

Edit: updated as had to click into category to follow

[Gæst]

@julian@community.nodebb.org

I can confirm it works with Mbin, look at my instance: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/activitypub@community.nodebb.org/p/286459/Happy-Tuesday-Today-we-ve-updated-the-NodeBB-community-forum-onto#post-comment-413326

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@julian @activitypub Makes sense. Were NodeBB's own federated categories represented as users prior to this change? Do you assume that all groups are FEP-1b12 groups?
There was an interesting discussion on SocialHub on identifying FEP-1b12 groups and nutomic made a compelling argument that we should just assume that Group supports FEP-1b12 if there is no other indicator:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-1b12-group-federation/2724/96