@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.

@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.

@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.

I can no longer reproduce the issue! :fireworks:

@julian That’s the URL I’ve tried to use. It just won’t fetch it for some reason. But if I search any of the comments, it’ll pull it in just fine. https://community.nodebb.org/post/103252, for instance, pulls the whole thread in.

Restarting nodeBB renders your missing comment, though!

Most other people won’t realize it either, I don’t think. I’ve just been clicking on everything with abandon and stumbled across it.

There’s a lot that can be done to make off-site content a bigger part of the forum user experience going forward, but I would agree that this is a big one. The mechanism is already there to do this – the All Topics button gives you the forum’s global feed – it could just use a little finessing.

I tried to sync @testing@chebucto.club with @testing-ground.

@julian said in Is ActivityPub too complicated?: > Let me look into nodebb-to-nodebb folllowing, that definitely should be working!

Have you verified that it is? Because I’m getting a never-ending Pending status when trying to sync to @testing-ground. Things federate fine, but without the syncing being established, they either don’t get addressed to my instance, or are dumped into /world if I specifically reference someone on my site. And it’s a little weird that they’re not all ending up in /world, because I have an account that’s following @testing-ground.