Live testing of remote categories

[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

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@silverpill@mitra.social good questions!

Local NodeBB categories are still federated out as ActivityPub actors, with as:type Group, they follow 1b12 as they always have.

I do assume that group actors adhere to 1b12, but that doesn’t stop others from creating topics by mentioning them directly. If a NodeBB instance happens to hear about that, we’ll add it to the remote category.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode the two bugs you identified have been resolved, can you confirm the latter? The former I manually moved them back already to the right category.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Confirmed working with:

• PieFed Communities: PieFed Meta
• Flipboard Magazines: [Gear by @engadget@flipboard.com](https://community.nodebb.org/category/gear-engadget@flipboard.com)

However, while Flipboard magazines send Announces as per 1b12, and the items are added to the outbox, the objects themselves do not address the magazine at all, and so a backreference is missing. When they come into NodeBB, there’s no pointer back to the group, and so it is slotted into the “uncategorized” bucket.

cc @mike@flipboard.social

tl;dr — can this object https://flipboard.com/users/Engadget/statuses/uva9misBSrqjCSR6mtzV6g:a:3199686 please include https://flipboard.com/@engadget/gear-nv6v86arz in its to or cc property?

[Gæst]

@julian Yes, I can confirm that the other bug has been fixed! There’s no more guest accounts in my /following page.

[mike@flipboard.social]

@julian not sure. Cc’ing @jaonculverhouse

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@silverpill@mitra.social I read back a bit to get a fuller context (not all the way, though, there’s a damn lot of bikeshedding in that topic.)

Basically Nutomic is advocating against multi typing because it is poorly supported (true), and because Lemmy has first-mover advantage (also true.)

Requiring a multitype or boolean flag for 1b12 would be quite difficult to do because you’ll never have 100% adoption and end up needing backwards compatibility with 1b12-classic anyway — cat’s already out of the bag.

[scott@loves.tech]

@julian How do you deal with situations where the group actor also sends posts?

For example, on Hubzilla, (streams), and Forte, the top level post of a forum thread is from the forum, not the user. This was originally done for Mastodon compatibility since it did not understand threaded conversations and groups. They could follow the forum as if it were a user, and receive all of the forum posts. They could send a DM to the forum to create a new post.

NodeBB took a different approach, using boosts to distribute user posts to people who follow the forum. And I think you said you use mentions within a post to create a new top level post.

How are we handling the differences in approaches?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@scott@loves.tech can you share an example of a group actor from Hubzilla? Would be interesting to see how that’s handled. Likely it wouldn’t work properly because categories in NodeBB don’t author posts.

Do your group actors send creates on behalf of regular users? That might work ok.

Lastly, there’s no requirement that a NodeBB category be mentioned. It only needs to be addressed. A mention is the easiest way to do that because you addressing is abstracted out of the Mastodon UI.

But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you’re able to change addressing based on where you create the post.

[scott@loves.tech]

@julian I'm not sure. They changed things in the last major version when they adopted FEP 171b Conversation Containers.

Some examples of forum channels are @Hubzilla Support Forum and @Neuhub Support Forum.

[scott@loves.tech]

@julian

But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you're able to change addressing based on where you create the post.

Yes, in Hubzilla, we can click on the padlock and select who the post is addressed to, including NodeBB forums. I haven't tried it yet, but Hubzilla does recognize NodeBB categories as "forums."

[scott@loves.tech]

@julian I just tried posting five different posts from Hubzilla to @Testing Ground via various methods, and none are showing up.

1. Post from a group actor, selecting audience from list.
2. Post from a group actor, using a mention.
3. Post from a normal actor, selecting audience from list.
4. Post from a normal actor, using a mention.
5. Post from a normal actor, posting to a Hubzilla Forum (group actor) and mentioning the NodeBB category in the post.

I am not sure if that forum is moderated, but none of my posts are showing up.

[scott@loves.tech]

By the way, we also have a test forum set up here: @Neuhub Test Forum

#^https://neuhub.org/channel/testforum

[scott@loves.tech]

#^https://community.nodebb.org/inbox    delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden    2025-03-30 22:51:57
#^https://community.nodebb.org/inbox    delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden    2025-03-30 23:28:55

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@scott@loves.tech Hubzilla is formatting its Notes in a manner I wasn’t expecting.

• The group actor is the attributedTo, which is not possible in NodeBB
• The note itself is not addressed to the group actor, only its followers collection
• There is no way to discern without parsing the note content itself who authored the original note.

So at present while I would be able to retrieve the note, without a proper backreference to the group actor, I don’t think I can slot it correctly.

Not sure why the received activity is returning a 403, as well.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Forgot to cc @mario@hub.somaton.com re: the above.

[scott@loves.tech]

@julian I saw a NodeBB test on Hubzilla Monster. I'm guessing that was you.

In order for you to properly mention someone, the Hubzilla server needs to know about that actor first. The easiest way to achieve this is to follow (connect to) that actor. This adds the actor to the database. This only needs to be done if no one on the server is following them or being followed by them.

This does create an extra step if the actor is unknown to the server, but it does force spammers to follow unknown actors before they can mention them.