NodeBB v4.8.0 — Crossposting, federated moves, API changes, and bug fixes!
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Hello from Canada!
We’re a week behind the planned release, but we’re dropping v4.8.0 today, containing some changes to our ActivityPub handling, along with a new API route, and bug fixes.
Crossposting
As briefly introduced in my earlier topic on cross-posting, NodeBB v4.8.0 supports cross-posting of topics between categories. More importantly, it means topics from other remote categories can now be added to local categories, which is another way to bring conversations to your local users.
Unlike before, where administrators were the only ones allowed to move topics from cid -1, cross-posting is available to all local users. If you see a topic on the fediverse you’d like to cross-post to a local category, just hit the cross-post button (it’s a button with a little upward-right pointing arrow), and share it with other users on your forum!
When you cross-post, it also shares the topic with all of your followers from outside of your forum.
Federated topic moving and removals
This was actually released with v4.7.0 but was improved slightly in the intervening versions. NodeBB now follows the Draft FEP f15d: Context Relocation and Removal and will publish
Removeactivities when a topic is moved to “Uncategorized”, andMoveactivities when moved to another category.Developers of other ActivityPub software looking to implement similar mechanics are advised to read the FEP and provide feedback here: https://activitypub.space/topic/86/fep-f15d-context-relocation-and-removal
Other technical debt and bug fixes
- Post ownership websocket call was migrated to a v3 REST API call
- Notifications had issues when user display names contained commas
- Piefed v1.5 supports emoji from remote instances; incoming custom emoji from Piefed are now handled
- Nodeinfo fixes for if a NodeBB instance is not actually federating (has AP turned off)
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System shared this topic
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If you cross post something to an unfederated or private forum, does it still get shared with your followers from remote servers? I mean I might want to share something with the members of the forum, without my remote followers seeing it. You have probably got that covered and it doesn’t go to remote followers (or you can’t cross post to unfederated forums), but asking just to be sure.
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@panos cross posts themselves are not federated out because there is no established standard or FEP that spells out how its done. (Not that that’s ever stopped me before… but I digress.)
When a user cross-posts a topic to another category it will federate out an “announce”, which looks like a boost on Mastodon.
I’ve put some of those checks in here for me to look at.
