Ideas for Federation
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In my ever-continuing use of NodeBB as a single-user Fediverse instance, here are some things I've noticed. Both things I've already talked about before, and some new things. These are some suggestions for functionality or perhaps plugins.
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Confusion between following remote categories as a user and the synchronization options in category settings as an admin. I think the category synchronization should be repurposed somewhat. The suggestion from @julian@community.nodebb.org was to perhaps rework it as a cross-posting feature.
- Right now, the feature relies on the other ActivityPub endpoint to be able to follow the NodeBB category, which (notably Lemmy) does not always work.
- Making a "proxy user" is a pretty common solution to this, used by Misskey etc. One single system proxy user can follow all remote categories, and then NodeBB itself can handle the synchronization.
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Lack of posts. This is a general problem for single-user instances, and it's why things like relays and Fedifetcher exist. Support for relays would help a lot, but a Fedifetcher-like plugin/function would be even better.
- Fedifetcher works by loading posts from the source server, and finding all the replies there. It then executes a search against your own server, which fofrces your server to load the reply. This should work just fine for NodeBB, because searching post links causes the posts to load.
- But Fedifetcher relies on platform-specific APIs (Mastodon, Misskey, etc). So I think this would be a good candidate for a NodeBB plugin.
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Slotting posts and topics into local categories. To me, this feels like the holy grail of integrating the traditional forum experience into the Fediverse. It's something I've brought up before, and someone was working on a plugin, but I'm not sure it ever got finished.
- It would be amazing to add a function in the admin settings under category settings to make a list of remote ActivityPub actors that get posts slotted into the category automatically.
- Any incoming note from that actor will be automatically put into the specified category.
- This shouldn't need to rely on altering or updating any synchronization stuff, because it can work with any incoming post. The framework for receiving remote posts is already there.
These are all just ideas, and maybe some discussion can be had on them before I start embarking on a path of attempting to make some NodeBB plugins
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