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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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[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

@Kichae I worked on this for most of this week. You can follow along with that effort here:

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13255

How exactly to integrate categories into the NodeBB UX is an interesting question. It's one thing to be able to render a remote as:Group actor as a category, and I think we'd want it to be searchable as well (otherwise how would you find them?)

That's the baseline.

Being able to customize your /world page with a selection of subcategories is really interesting... I am not sure I'd want to allow users to customize the /categories page, so /world seems like a nice place for it.

Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

[–] altcode@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories: > Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

My thinking was that all the remote categories you follow are listed in your /world page - as opposed to being mixed alonside your followed accounts in your /user//following page.

But being able to pin the ones you most care about actually sounds good too.

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@AltCode said in Forum specific UX for remote categories: > My thinking was that all the remote categories you follow are listed in your /world page

That might get a little hairy if you follow a lot of categories.

Right now posts from any categories you follow would still show up in your world feed. If you follow a remote category, you would essentially be "tracking" the category, in NodeBB parlance. New topics and posts would show up in your /unread and /recent. If you "watch" the category, then you'll be notified of every new topic.

[–] altcode@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories: > That might get a little hairy if you follow a lot of categories.

I did not consider that, you're right :sweat_smile:

Though if I wasn't clear, what I'm hoping to see is a page similar to the /categories page, but instead of listing local categories, it lists all the remote categories you are following, or to use NodeBB parlance, "tracking".

Perhaps a /world/categories page? So in addition to being able to "pin" them to /world, you can also quickly find all your other watched remote categories there.

Additionally, maybe you could also have a dedicated page for all the remote categories NodeBB is currently aware of, like the /recent?cid=-1 page.

[–] kichae@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago

@AltCode One significant potential issues with listing all followed categories in the same kind of layout as /categories is the below-the-fold effect, or the page-2 effect as one might have called it in earlier times. Whatever categories end up falling below a certain scroll distance will just never been seen by most users. If you follow a lot of categories, the ones that end up closer to the bottom of the list than the top will just end up ignored. It doesn't encourage participation, and it also doesn't discourage following a lot of categories that you don't actually care about.

And follow relationships are very important under ActivityPub, since they dictate content flow. Bringing in a lot of remote content that no one on the local forum is actually reading or engaging with is very wasteful.

An easily accessible compact list might be better, with different sorting options so that users can choose to have categories with new content float to the top. Usually with forum categories, you want the ordering to be static, but that expectation won't necessarily be there for just a list.

[–] kichae@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories: Well, this sounds absolutely amazing.

> Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

Oh, that would be my personal preference, and I imagine it would be what many others looking for a federated forum would prefer, too. Forums are semi-curated spaces, after all. The only reason allowing users to customize their view of /categories is I think it might be what users who grew up with big social would expect. Like, a lot of ex-redditors using Lemmy-based websites seem to actively resent the idea that the local website should be meaningful in any way, or that they should engage with anything other than their f.

But it's probably not what's best for the forum. Nor for the fediverse.

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

@Kichae my fear is that adding in the ability for users to customize the forum index would dilute the importance of local categories.

I'm always a big supporter of community building, and while I am very appreciative of the network effects of activitypub, there is the other local community building side that I would want to keep top of mind as well.