Live testing of remote categories
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Happy Tuesday!
Today we've updated the NodeBB community forum onto the
remote-categoriestesting branch, which means that users on the open social web that identify themselves as "Groups" will be rendered in NodeBB as categories. Prior to this, they looked like users.Here are some examples of remote categories:
- Comic Strips (on lemmy.ml)
- Star Trek Social Club (on startrek.website)
- Social Web Foundation (a WordPress blog)
ActivityPub "groups" and forum categories have quite a few things in common — they don't usually post topic themselves, they "contain" topics, and they are usually administered by a separate group of users (moderators!) In many ways, these groups lend themselves to categories much more easily than they do as users.
Notes:
- We will likely be releasing this as v4.3.0-alpha this Wednesday. Probably this means you don't want this on a live forum just yet.
- A lot of the backend logic is complete, but a lot of the frontend UX will be worked on.
- You can "search" for categories (via "in categories" in the search page), paste the full handle in order to instruct NodeBB to pull a new category in.
- You can now no longer mention a remote category. Instead, create your topic right in that category itself. As it should be
. - Remote content coming in that is slotted into a remote category will still show up in your "world" feed. That is still intended to be where discovery of content outside the local NodeBB instance will take place.
- Report any bugs or confusing behaviours (and there will be some) here.
Screenshots
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@julian one thing to watch out for is that not every Group represents something that can be mapped to a category
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@julian or, rather, if you stretch the concept a little bit, every outbox could represent a "category", just with unknown rules
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This is very interesting, so how do I use it?
So to try it here - Is there a remote-categories area somewhere?
For instance if I want to post to @medicine@mander.xyz where to select this? -
@trwnh@mastodon.social said in Live testing of remote categories:
> one thing to watch out for is that not every Group represents something that can be mapped to a categorySure, but they most of them also don't represent something that can be considered an individual. And it's way easier to treat a 'category' as a group than it is to treat a group as an individual.
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@kichae i mean they're all actors as far as activitypub is concerned. what is a blog, if not a category by a different name?
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@eeeee you'll want to search for the category (how, is outlined in the top post) to access it.
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@trwnh@mastodon.social Sure, but in terms of usage, most group actors are going to be sharing collections of posts by multiple users that have some connection or commonality, which will far, far, far more commonly seem appropriate to map on to a category than anything else.
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@julian said in Live testing of remote categories:
> You can now no longer mention a remote category. Instead, create your topic right in that category itself. As it should be .Huzzah!
Now, are there any plans to support cross-posting?
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@Kichae at some point, but that's a bit more niche of a use case. Doesn't mean there isn't use for it though. The underlying structure of NodeBB ties a topic to a single category, but supporting cross posting could be something we add on top of that.
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@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.
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@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...
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@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
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@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...
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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 !?
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@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.
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@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 -
@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 = f1id = p1
type = [as:Event, sioc:Post]
as:name = "Meeting on April 2025"
sioc:has_container = t1
sioc:has_creator = g1
as:attributedTo = g1
``` -
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](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground). -
@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.
