NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!
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Today's the day!
After nearly a full year in development, NodeBB v4.0.0 has landed, bringing federation between NodeBB instances (and a connection to the wider fediverse of social media) to forum software.
Fedi-what?
Fediverse! Here's a TechCrunch primer about it, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that NodeBB plugs in to a wider social network so that you don't have to cultivate an audience, they're already there.
The genesis
It was back in mid-2023 when I had the initial idea of interconnecting NodeBB forums. Back then, I had far smaller ambitions... I wanted a singular NodeBB to be able to communicate with other forums running NodeBB. To do that, we'd need to build out a centralized service to act as a bridge between instances, and corresponding slim clients on individual installs to consume the relayed data. At the time, concept like decentralization were not even part of my thought process.
It was during this period when I was doing my research that I stumbled on Mastodon, and later, ActivityPub, the protocol that powers it all. Since then, it's been one wild ride getting NodeBB to speak the same language.
Funding
Soon after dipping my toes into all that Mastodon had to offer, I discovered the NLNet Foundation, and their corresponding fund — NGI Zero Core. With the promise of funding, NodeBB could fully commit to implementing the protocol in short order, instead of piece by piece over time. We sent in an application and were delighted to be approved for the August 2023 call.
Their funding was instrumental in providing the financial stability to experiment with ActivityPub and to participate in developer circles, such as the SWICG, FediForum, and much more.
The fund continues to operate, perhaps you could benefit, or donate to the cause. It has certainly made a difference to NodeBB.
Federate, or not, it's your choice
NodeBB v4 comes shipped with the capability to interact with other NodeBB forums and any other ActivityPub-speaking software, right out of the box. We opted to make this a core feature instead of a plugin, since there were many changes made to core to support even the concept of accepting content from outside itself.
To that end, any users upgrading from v3.x will automatically have federation disabled, in order to reduce surprise. Any new forums will federate automatically.
You can turn federation on and off (and adjust some other fun toggles) directly from
ACP > Settings > Federation (ActivityPub).Even after turning federation on, how you use it shapes how well connected you will be. There is no centralized authority artificially boosting your content, so the name of the game is establishing two-way follow relationships to other sites.
The ActivityPub Equalizer
We're not alone in this journey to interoperate with other decentralized services. We're not even the only forum software to attempt to do so.
- Discourse has a working plugin.
- Ghost is building out in the open.
I specifically highlight these two because they both started in the early 2010s, same as NodeBB. It's always been a bit of an informal competition between us, and we always checked in on what the others were doing (growth-wise, pricing-wise, etc.) Truth be told, I don't think the ghost team ever really noticed NodeBB, but I digress...
The funny thing about ActivityPub is that at the end of the day, the overarching goal of seamless communication breaks down any barriers between competing organizations.
NodeBB and Discourse have been vying for the exact same market share (forums, community-building, self-started or enterprise) for over 10 years, and it was only after ActivityPub came around that the dev teams even started talking to one another.
Funny how that works.
So how does it all work?
Our documentation portal has been updated with the latest information about the ActivityPub functionality in v4.
If you have any questions about how it works or how to configure some aspect of it, please don't hesitate to reach out in the corresponding v4 support thread.
If you run NodeBB, the quickest way to see this in action is to upgrade to v4, and then paste this post's URL into your search bar. It should show up automatically, and you should be able to read and reply to it, directly from your own forum. Neat!
wrote on 25 Jan 2025, 15:31 last edited by@julian I read this whole thing wondering how NodeBB posts would look from my instance and then clicked your link at the end and realized I'd been reading one the whole time lol. Super cool, hope this takes off!
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@julian@community.nodebb.org said in NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!:
I'm wondering, as a stopgap solution, would it make sense to have some kind of rules engine that allows topics coming in from the fediverse to automatically be moved to NodeBB categories? Kind of like a somewhat less elegant sync.
Edit: like automatically assigning incoming topics based on tags seems like a particularly easy solution?
wrote on 25 Jan 2025, 16:59 last edited by@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is thanks for the suggestion, that's definitely something I'd want to consider.
Sort of a post queue for federated content that needs automatic or manual review before it is automatically slotted in a category.
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@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is thanks for the suggestion, that's definitely something I'd want to consider.
Sort of a post queue for federated content that needs automatic or manual review before it is automatically slotted in a category.
wrote on 25 Jan 2025, 17:01 last edited by@julian@community.nodebb.org Thanks. Even something as simple as mappin topic tags to categories automatically would work I think.
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@julian@community.nodebb.org Thanks. Even something as simple as mappin topic tags to categories automatically would work I think.
wrote on 25 Jan 2025, 17:39 last edited by@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is careful with that though, not all tags are the same, some have a higher signal-to-noise ratio, but others would just be filled with garbage
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Today's the day!
After nearly a full year in development, NodeBB v4.0.0 has landed, bringing federation between NodeBB instances (and a connection to the wider fediverse of social media) to forum software.
Fedi-what?
Fediverse! Here's a TechCrunch primer about it, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that NodeBB plugs in to a wider social network so that you don't have to cultivate an audience, they're already there.
The genesis
It was back in mid-2023 when I had the initial idea of interconnecting NodeBB forums. Back then, I had far smaller ambitions... I wanted a singular NodeBB to be able to communicate with other forums running NodeBB. To do that, we'd need to build out a centralized service to act as a bridge between instances, and corresponding slim clients on individual installs to consume the relayed data. At the time, concept like decentralization were not even part of my thought process.
It was during this period when I was doing my research that I stumbled on Mastodon, and later, ActivityPub, the protocol that powers it all. Since then, it's been one wild ride getting NodeBB to speak the same language.
Funding
Soon after dipping my toes into all that Mastodon had to offer, I discovered the NLNet Foundation, and their corresponding fund — NGI Zero Core. With the promise of funding, NodeBB could fully commit to implementing the protocol in short order, instead of piece by piece over time. We sent in an application and were delighted to be approved for the August 2023 call.
Their funding was instrumental in providing the financial stability to experiment with ActivityPub and to participate in developer circles, such as the SWICG, FediForum, and much more.
The fund continues to operate, perhaps you could benefit, or donate to the cause. It has certainly made a difference to NodeBB.
Federate, or not, it's your choice
NodeBB v4 comes shipped with the capability to interact with other NodeBB forums and any other ActivityPub-speaking software, right out of the box. We opted to make this a core feature instead of a plugin, since there were many changes made to core to support even the concept of accepting content from outside itself.
To that end, any users upgrading from v3.x will automatically have federation disabled, in order to reduce surprise. Any new forums will federate automatically.
You can turn federation on and off (and adjust some other fun toggles) directly from
ACP > Settings > Federation (ActivityPub).Even after turning federation on, how you use it shapes how well connected you will be. There is no centralized authority artificially boosting your content, so the name of the game is establishing two-way follow relationships to other sites.
The ActivityPub Equalizer
We're not alone in this journey to interoperate with other decentralized services. We're not even the only forum software to attempt to do so.
- Discourse has a working plugin.
- Ghost is building out in the open.
I specifically highlight these two because they both started in the early 2010s, same as NodeBB. It's always been a bit of an informal competition between us, and we always checked in on what the others were doing (growth-wise, pricing-wise, etc.) Truth be told, I don't think the ghost team ever really noticed NodeBB, but I digress...
The funny thing about ActivityPub is that at the end of the day, the overarching goal of seamless communication breaks down any barriers between competing organizations.
NodeBB and Discourse have been vying for the exact same market share (forums, community-building, self-started or enterprise) for over 10 years, and it was only after ActivityPub came around that the dev teams even started talking to one another.
Funny how that works.
So how does it all work?
Our documentation portal has been updated with the latest information about the ActivityPub functionality in v4.
If you have any questions about how it works or how to configure some aspect of it, please don't hesitate to reach out in the corresponding v4 support thread.
If you run NodeBB, the quickest way to see this in action is to upgrade to v4, and then paste this post's URL into your search bar. It should show up automatically, and you should be able to read and reply to it, directly from your own forum. Neat!
wrote on 26 Jan 2025, 04:32 last edited by@julian so cool, can't wait to upgrade my nodebb forum to V4 (I'm exclusively on mobile for a few days)
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@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is careful with that though, not all tags are the same, some have a higher signal-to-noise ratio, but others would just be filled with garbage
wrote on 27 Jan 2025, 11:48 last edited by@julian@community.nodebb.org said in NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!:
@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is careful with that though, not all tags are the same, some have a higher signal-to-noise ratio, but others would just be filled with garbage
I think the best way, then, would be to have rules that map various group actor URLs to categories, and possibly also tags. Nothing automatic. Only configured. Of course, once Lemmy fixes the ability of Group actors to follow other Group actors, this will be a non-issue.
One other possible solution, which is employed by Misskey et al., is a proxy actor. It's a special user that follows other users, and relays info within its own instance. It's used for doing things like adding a remote user to a list without directly following them. The proxy account follows the user, and then your local instance adds the remote user to your list. But all ActivityPub interactions go through the proxy user.
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wrote on 2 Feb 2025, 09:01 last edited by
If you have deployed NodeBB v4, and you updated to v4.0.1, please update now to v4.0.2 which fixes a regression that silently broke outgoing user follows.
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wrote on 2 Feb 2025, 16:12 last edited by
@julian@community.nodebb.org said in NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!:
Do we need need to refollow? -
wrote on 2 Feb 2025, 16:29 last edited by
@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is if you browse to the account it will show as unfollowed, so you will need to refollow, yes.
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wrote on 4 Feb 2025, 19:20 last edited by
@julian
Upgrading to 4.02 tonight. Let's see how it federates. Congrats and thank you for your work. -
wrote on 12 Feb 2025, 10:36 last edited by
@julian It is interesting to see long form content in the Fediverse. I'm still not used to it.
Pretty cool.
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@julian haha now that reposting from fedi instances is possible, maybe you need to collapse the "... shared this topic N minutes ago", by default in the UI
wrote on 21 Feb 2025, 18:03 last edited by@wall_e@ioc.exchange This is done now, consecutive shares are merged.
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wrote on 2 Apr 2025, 23:10 last edited by
Hi from Lemmy
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wrote 20 days ago last edited by
@julian So... I wonder if NodeBB is/can be a Fediverse instance now basically? Meaning, can registered users interact with other Fediverse instances?
I'm considering building a special interest community with NodeBB as a base. But some might want to create and/or embed media content and I'm thinking of using own PeerTube, Pixelfed instances for example for this purpose. Would a NodeBB user be able to interact with them? And can I gate areas from being public? Because of NSFW content.
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@julian So... I wonder if NodeBB is/can be a Fediverse instance now basically? Meaning, can registered users interact with other Fediverse instances?
I'm considering building a special interest community with NodeBB as a base. But some might want to create and/or embed media content and I'm thinking of using own PeerTube, Pixelfed instances for example for this purpose. Would a NodeBB user be able to interact with them? And can I gate areas from being public? Because of NSFW content.
wrote 20 days ago last edited by@willi@social.tchncs.de yes to all, NodeBB is a fediverse instance now
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wrote 20 days ago last edited by
@julian That's great! Any tips starting this as cheap as possible and with least amount of caring work? I've read so far you need VPS which is not only costly(?) but also backup etc would be in my hands, right? Would like to avoid that tbh.
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@julian That's great! Any tips starting this as cheap as possible and with least amount of caring work? I've read so far you need VPS which is not only costly(?) but also backup etc would be in my hands, right? Would like to avoid that tbh.
wrote 20 days ago last edited by@willi@social.tchncs.de a VPS can be had from DigitalOcean or Vultr quite economically (although I know that isn't always the case in some countries)
You can also use our referral link for an account credit too!
