Monday, January 20, 2025

NodeBB v4 launched today with Activitypub support

I’m not actually very familiar with NodeBB. I’ve used the older web boards like phpBB, as well as newer ones like Vanilla and Discourse, the latter of which seems to be everywhere.

Federating forums is an exciting area for the Fediverse. Lemmy has been moderately successful, but emulates Reddit more than a traditional message board (“traditional” maybe not a great differentiator, when Reddit turns 20 this year, but you know what I mean).

Facebook Groups helps keep people tethered to Facebook. I have to keep my account active to stay connected with my neighbors and with my kids’ schools. An open web alternative would be a great way to loosen their grip on people.

One tough part of building ActivityPub apps is deciding how much to cater to Mastodon’s implemention vs doing what makes sense at the protocol level. In a way it reminds me of the bad old days of web development, choosing semantic tags vs. ones that actually work in popular browsers.

I’m going to dig into NodeBB’s federation more, NodeBB’s ActivityPub documentation is here, but I’m excited to see an existing platform adopt ActivityPub.