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 @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] for prodding me to get this sorted out!

  • julian@community.nodebb.orgOP
    2·
    12 hours ago

    @[email protected] there is some active discussion around how to better represent federated communities. The current iteration of NodeBB will bring them in as regular user accounts that can be followed, and this is tested and working with Lemmy and PieFed, primarily.

    @Kichae, two things:

    1. You’re right, and I’ve brought that up internally. It’s difficult to justify the change in UX, but there may be a way to support both UX flows with the addition of a checkbox that adjusts toPid/inReplyTo. The downside of that is the whole point of the quick-reply box is to actively limit the number of visible controls :smirk:

    2. A threaded view is difficult because it is not scalable, at least with the way our current backend is built out. We load topics page by page, which means every page is loading in O(x*n) time¹, where x is the number of posts. If we wanted to load a threaded view, we’d have to query every single post and build the threaded relationship on-the-fly, since we don’t maintain that in the backend, and that’s… O(a lot more)²

    There is a way we can approximate the threaded UI, but @baris and I haven’t played around with it for a couple years…

    ¹ I am not well-versed in computer science so I may be wildly wrong about this ² very scientific, yes.

    • onlinepersona
      1·
      12 hours ago

      If threading isn’t built-in, it could indeed be problematic. But Lemmy solved it and postgres (if you’re using it) does have solutions for tree structures. Personally, ltree is a favourite, however it does lock you into postgres. Recursive queries are supported by mariadb and other databases, but I don’t know about their performance.

      In any case, if it’s ever implemented, nodebb would be a nice alternative to Lemmy (at least to test).

      Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Kichae@community.nodebb.org
      1·
      12 hours ago

      @julian Personally, I find the reply list – and especially the new auto-quote back-references – a more than sufficient solution, but then I don’t think threaded discussions are a value-add to the bulletin board experience.

      It’s just not part of the expected UX, and kind of breaks the BB UX, which has always been built on the expectation of reverse-chronological posting. Not that I don’t understand the utility, or someone having the preference. Threading is now ubiquitous on other social modals. It’s become part of the design language of Web 2.0.

      Some platforms that use threading now only load the first couple of levels of replies. I wonder if that’s something that’s currently possible via theme work, or if a plugin would be required, or even if work on core would be necessary. Or if some sort of popup modal that loads threads might be viable? Solutions that wouldn’t require the threads to be pre-loaded.

      • julian@community.nodebb.orgOP
        1·
        11 hours ago

        @Kichae the workaround that @baris and I played around with (very) briefly involved the “x replies” expando button.

        I think there were some rather simple adjustments made to load only one level at a time, and that was essentially the “threaded” view.

        I don’t remember the details any more, perhaps he does.