NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!

Today’s the day!

After nearly a full year in development, NodeBB v4.0.0 has landed, bringing federation between NodeBB instances (and a connection to the wider fediverse of social media) to forum software.

Fedi-what?

Fediverse! Here’s a TechCrunch primer about it, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that NodeBB plugs in to a wider social network so that you don’t have to cultivate an audience, they’re already there.

The genesis

It was back in mid-2023 when I had the initial idea of interconnecting NodeBB forums. Back then, I had far smaller ambitions… I wanted a singular NodeBB to be able to communicate with other forums running NodeBB. To do that, we’d need to build out a centralized service to act as a bridge between instances, and corresponding slim clients on individual installs to consume the relayed data. At the time, concept like decentralization were not even part of my thought process.

It was during this period when I was doing my research that I stumbled on Mastodon, and later, ActivityPub, the protocol that powers it all. Since then, it’s been one wild ride getting NodeBB to speak the same language.

Funding

Soon after dipping my toes into all that Mastodon had to offer, I discovered the NLNet Foundation, and their corresponding fund — NGI Zero Core. With the promise of funding, NodeBB could fully commit to implementing the protocol in short order, instead of piece by piece over time. We sent in an application and were delighted to be approved for the August 2023 call.

Their funding was instrumental in providing the financial stability to experiment with ActivityPub and to participate in developer circles, such as the SWICG, FediForum, and much more.

The fund continues to operate, perhaps you could benefit, or donate to the cause. It has certainly made a difference to NodeBB.

Federate, or not, it’s your choice

NodeBB v4 comes shipped with the capability to interact with other NodeBB forums and any other ActivityPub-speaking software, right out of the box. We opted to make this a core feature instead of a plugin, since there were many changes made to core to support even the concept of accepting content from outside itself.

To that end, any users upgrading from v3.x will automatically have federation disabled, in order to reduce surprise. Any new forums will federate automatically.

You can turn federation on and off (and adjust some other fun toggles) directly from ACP > Settings > Federation (ActivityPub).

Even after turning federation on, how you use it shapes how well connected you will be. There is no centralized authority artificially boosting your content, so the name of the game is establishing two-way follow relationships to other sites.

The ActivityPub Equalizer

We’re not alone in this journey to interoperate with other decentralized services. We’re not even the only forum software to attempt to do so.

• Discourse has a working plugin.
• Ghost is building out in the open.

I specifically highlight these two because they both started in the early 2010s, same as NodeBB. It’s always been a bit of an informal competition between us, and we always checked in on what the others were doing (growth-wise, pricing-wise, etc.) Truth be told, I don’t think the ghost team ever really noticed NodeBB, but I digress…

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.

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.

So how does it all work?

Our documentation portal has been updated with the latest information about the ActivityPub functionality in v4.

If you have any questions about how it works or how to configure some aspect of it, please don’t hesitate to reach out in the corresponding v4 support thread.

If you run NodeBB, the quickest way to see this in action is to upgrade to v4, and then paste this post’s URL into your search bar. It should show up automatically, and you should be able to read and reply to it, directly from your own forum. Neat!