this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
2 points (100.0% liked)

ActivityPub

0 readers
3 users here now

Focused discussion related to ActivityPub integration in NodeBB


This is a forum category containing topical discussion. You can start new discussions by mentioning this category.

founded 9 months ago
 

So I was wondering if there was a way for me to have a Category follow a federated account.

I can't seem to find the way to do it if that's possible.

But optimally the category would post a topic related to the new posts the followed account would post. Or something like that.

top 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

My first experience with Federation was with Calckey, (fork of Miskey.) I liked some things about it, but there were forks of forks and I never knew in the end which variant of it was best to use :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I need this too. Ok, my idea is to create an category. Example "Linux". Now i follow some people, example @[email protected] And then all Posts will show in my category. Please add this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

@[email protected] the reason why I'm hesitant about this is because allowing a category to follow a user bakes in the assumption that everything the user posts is relevant.

If you're following something like the linux foundation that's a pretty safe bet for a Linux category, but what if you follow a user and they start sharing or posting about unrelated things, like what they had for breakfast, etc.?

That's where things could get messy.


But, I absolutely love :heart: the idea of creating a category and making it sort of like a curated channel based around one idea.

This is the kind of cool stuff I want to see!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

@[email protected]

Perhaps as a compromise, you shouldn't follow a user, but instead follow hashtags that match the topic of the category.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

@julian I have the same hesitations around having categories follow user accounts. Most users are not categories, and they do not post categorically.

But some are. Satire accounts. Bot accounts. Institutional accounts, as you've called out. These are fairly safe bets, and it would be nice to allow admins the choice to roll the dice.

But another paradigm to explore is lists, and there are a number of ways to represent those. /world could be reconfigured into /feed (stepping on the toes of the Feeds plugin), with users being able to create arbitrary feeds for themselves.

Or lists could be represented as user-created pseudo-categories, given the UX of a forum category, but being personal to the user. They could be presented in /world exclusively, or appended to the bottom of the user's categories list.

Forum-wide lists could be considered, creating global pseudo-categories defined by admins or moderators, with a slightly modified layout and/or visual language.

This is really the transformation of a long standing medium. There's a huge possibility and design space here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@[email protected] this is now done. Turns out I wasn't actually stopping a category from following a user, so that didn't need rolling back.

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13232

@[email protected] using a hashtag is probably also something I should allow categories to follow, although that's local-only to the instance because of how hashtags work.

Either way I didn't want to restrict a valid use case :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

@julian Are categories supposed to follow regular users from this ufollow.jpg screen in admin panel. Asking this because I tried putting a mastodon user profile link in the textbox but upon clicking on 'Follow' nothing happened. For threads, the request is pending(with some error, I guess) as you can see from the picture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

@bh4-tech can you supply the URLs you tried to follow please?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@bh4-tech might be not working because I did not expect urls. Can you try a handle like [email protected]?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

@julian Yeah that worked for mastodon, but not for threads. Guess that's some problem on thread's side and not nodebb.

However, the remote media preview problem still remains https://community.nodebb.org/post/103782 . Guess you will need to cache remote media like misskey.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@CWSmith not right now, no. A category can only follow other accounts that identify themselves as "Group". This is to take advantage of synchronization logic that regular users don't supply (and even then not all groups do either).

However I'll keep this workflow in mind, it's an interesting idea!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

@julian

No problem.

In my head I was thinking of a Federated account like a WordPress blog that has ActivityPub installed and confirmed working. Everyone in the Fediverse can see it, but having it followed and posted in Forum puts it there in front of the Community for a more direct conversation.

I am gonna start installing and trying to figure out ActivityPub into my Drupal projects even if I am not thrilled with my previous dealings with that module.