NodeBB Officially Joins the Fediverse
The popular forum software now supports federation...
NodeBB is a popular open source platform for community forums, and can be compared to Discourse and Flarum. While the project has been dogfooding federation support for months, the NodeBB v 4.0 release brings network interoperability to the forefront.
Julian Lam (@julian) , one of NodeBB’s cofounders, has put in an extensive amount of legwork into adapting the software to the many different quirks between various different ActivityPub implementations, going as far as establishing ForumWG, a task force dedicated to standardizing how federated forums work together.
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.
Julian Lam
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.
As a result, NodeBB is compatible with other community group platforms, such as Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed, and the ActivityPub Discourse plugin used by SocialHub. These different platforms still have some UX papercuts to address — for example, Lemmy doesn’t leverage Webfinger in its search function to look up content at a URL, whereas NodeBB does. Hopefully, cross-project collaboration can lead to fewer discrepancies between platforms.
What’s Next?
There seems to be a gradual uptick in forum platforms developing ActivityPub group / forum implementations of their own:
- The Discourse community has been talking about adopting ActivityPub since 2018, and their community plugin is actively maintained. It’s possible that NodeBB’s announcement might give Discourse a greater incentive to support ActivityPub officially.
- Flarum has also made public statements about ActivityPub support as part of their platform’s upcoming 2.0 release.
- Pixelfed is still working on implementing their Groups feature, which will ostensibly be compatible with all of these other different platforms.
- Friendica and its many descendents all support Groups in one way or another, and will likely end up being compatible with the rest of this growing roster of supporters.
The most immediate change we can expect from this is a convergence of many different kinds of platforms all aiming to support the same basic features. In the short term, this will probably lead to a substantial amount of debugging, but could lead towards a large part of the Fediverse moving beyond short-form microblogging.
Another interesting possibility here is that these nascent efforts might lead to some new applications, such leveraging NodeBB or another piece of software as a drop-in replacement for Quora or StackExchange.
