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Forum specific UX for remote categories (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 1 week ago by julian@community.nodebb.org to c/activitypub@community.nodebb.org

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The upcoming possibility of browsing to remote federated categories/communities has me thinking about interesting use cases for it.

Note that Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, and other "community-centric" software already do support this, so it's nothing new, I'm actually playing catch-up.

One interesting use case centers around NodeBB's /unread route, which tracks new topics since your last visit. Since ever, and even now in v4, this is only for local categories, but if you're able to "subscribe" to a remote category, then we could enable use of this page for that content too.

Think about waking up and seeing a self-curated feed of new content from your subscribed communities! There are some interesting parallels to RSS here, too.

What other forum-centric use cases do you think would be enhanced by the ability to browse remote categories?

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[–] eeeee@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 week ago (9 children)

If a site has a 'niche' theme and you want to find people with likeminded interests out in the Fediverse, the searching would be useful. Correct me if I am wrong, but Mastodon doesn't seem to have categories, Ive only seen it on Lemmy. In a way a category on Lemmy is like a nodebb instance, as most nodebb instances are for a certain area. So one might argue that posting on a particular nodebb forum is akin to posting on a Lemmy category?

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 week ago

@eeeee a forum is usually structured around a common theme, yes. For example, community.nodebb.org is centred around support/discussion for NodeBB.

However, nothing stops someone from creating a general-interest forum, and that's why I prefer to think of NodeBB categories as like Lemmy communities.

You are correct in that Mastodon does not have the concept of categories. In fact that have not much concept of organization of content outside of reply-trees, and that is partly by design and partly by the constraints from the microblogging style.

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