We just released version 4.1.0 of NodeBB. Here are the latest features you can now take advantage of!
As an aside, for the first time in a long while, both @baris and I are working on the same codebase again. Up until version 4 was released, I’d been working on the activitypub branch and periodically merging in the latest changes from develop. It’s nice to be home! :house_with_garden:
Improved federation of Group actors :left_speech_bubble:
We’ve improved the activity synchronization for followed group actors. Local updates/likes/etc. are now federated outward by the category in addition to those from remote users. Thanks to @rimu@piefed.social and @freamon who worked with me on debugging this one.
Mentions and Emoji now federating out in source.content :wave:
Emoji and mentions have been sent out to followers since v4, but that wasn’t reflected in the raw markdown content that we also send along. That has been remediated now, and this change improves nodebb-to-nodebb federation.
Video object type now parseable :tv:
NodeBB is now able to ingest Peertube Video objects, and render then in a topic just like other pieces of content. Thanks @deadsuperhero@forum.wedistribute.org for prodding me to get this sorted out!
this is stuck as the most recent post for me lol
Lmao same, been like this on and off for a few days.
I noticed this last night. I think it’s been going on for a couple days now. What gives?
@kspatlas@kbin.earth loving how this is messing with AP instances everywhere lol.
I updated the timestamp but it doesn’t seem to have propagated over to your instance!
Yeah, right now this instance is not the best federate
@kspatlas@kbin.earth the post itself has the correct timestamp doesn’t it? I’m asking because I can’t really tell for sure since I’m unfamiliar with kbin/lemmy
@julian This post as it appears on kbin.earth thinks it’s from 11 months in the future, with a timestamp of 2026-02-27. It looks fine elsewhere though (e.g. on Lemmy). NodeBB has sent out some incorrect activities for this post, so I’m guessing that Lemmy fixed itself after processing a later Update, but MBIN didn’t get it or didn’t process it (I’m not that familiar with it, but it looks like no-one there is subscribed to either the category or you, so I don’t even know how they created it in the first place)
@freamon thanks, will have to mock up an update and send it their way specifically I guess.
@julian@community.nodebb.org Don’t worry about it; I have manually fixed the post’s timestamp to the correct time. It’s likely it didn’t receive an update because nobody has subscribed to the category (or followed your user).
@rimu@piefed.social @baris@kbin.earth @freamon@kbin.earth @kspatlas@kbin.earth @julian@kbin.earth @freamon@community.nodebb.org
@jwr1@kbin.earth interesting how the mentions for our local users (@julian and @baris) autocompleted with the kbin.earth domain.
Yeah, not an ideal experience. I guess a placeholder as suggested above would be a better experience, especially for users not familiar with concept of fediverse.
@bh4-tech @Kichae what you’re seeing is a link rendered by the link-preview plugin because the image hasn’t been loaded yet.
What’s supposed to happen is the link gets replaced in real time with the image or box, but sometimes the timing is off and the loaded post doesn’t load in time to catch the response.
Blah de blah technical stuff. It can be fixed I think…
@julian@community.nodebb.org for some reason in Lemmy this post is stuck at the top of the “New” sort, even though it’s already 2 days old.
@julian Consider adding
.mentionclass to mentions in HTML content. Some clients transform such links into internal links.Well, depending on a class from a 3rd-party is not the best way to go about it. Anyway, the server should reconstruct the html and add the appropriate
.mentionclass based on any existingMentionlinks from the ActivityPub object.@rikudou@lemmings.world that was my thinking as well.
@silverpill@mitra.social ironically we do add that class in NodeBB, but we explicitly strip out all custom class names because there’s no guarantee that recipients would know how to handle it.
Since a
.mentionhas no standardized meaning, I opted to remove it for federated content.Also mentions can be detected in content as they’re explicitly defined in the payload.
Restart from admin panel or stop and start from cmd on server?
@bh4-tech either
@julian Restarting also did not change anything. Also, noticed that if a post on mastodon, lemmy or threads has an image, it is shown beside the topic headline as a thumbnail but is not rendered below the actual text as an image. I guess that once this problem is fixed, videos(or video links) will also get rendered. The same behavior is observed on both community.nodebb.org as well as my nodebb instance. Attaching screenshots of both- 1)community.nodebb.org with a lemmy post
2)my nodebb instance with a mastodon post
@bh4-tech Update: I think that community.nodebb.org is now running with latest commits from the develop branch and so remote images and videos can be viewed once we click on the attachment link. But I think the UX can be somewhat improved.
Current experience- A remote post contains a media file. The file(image) is not displayed below the text and only its link is displayed. An unaware user might not notice that it’s an image and not click on the link thinking it’s an external link and, in that case, will only see the text and so the post will feel awkward to the user.(I know that once any one user clicks on a link, the media gets loaded inline automatically for all other users, but even that also seems a good amount of friction). Also, if the forum is installed as PWA, clicking the media link will open it in a custom tab.
Possible improvement- Instead of the link, show a simmerring image loading animation(the one we see on instagram or youtube when images/thumbnails are loading) with the text “Click to view” and upon clicking on the animation the media gets loaded.
@bh4-tech FWIW, refreshing the posts has worked to load media links in line for me. Still not an ideal experience, but better than having to click on the image links.
Same thing, no video on restart.
@julian Is Video support limited to just Peertube videos? Asking this because, a video post on threads renders properly on mastodon and kokonnect(misskey fork) but only the text is displayed and not the video on my nodeb instance running 4.1.0. The post is https://www.threads.net/@b4htech/post/DGmUEn7y76q?xmt=AQGz1bBLfaQf_DsxBxScCQa7LxwcwQD3CSh5bf7j8nU0fA
Below attached are the screenshots of the above post on- 1)
mastodon2)
kokonnect3)
My nodebb instance https://ekk.app/@bh4-tech might be a caching issue. Any chance you can restart your NodeBB and see if the link shows up?
Right now the video player won’t embed, but the minimum should be a link.
Does nodebb support following/joining federated communities? And does it support switching to a threaded view?
@onlinepersona@programming.dev Following groups on other sites works well. The current default theme doesn’t do visual threading, but reply relationships are maintained and linked. QuickReply kind of quietly discourages direct replies to comments, though, so I imagine many users - especially those new to the bulletin board experience - may end up replying to OPs, especially without a threaded UI.
I’m sure there’s nothing stopping someone from making a threaded theme, though.
