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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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[–] kichae@community.nodebb.org 1 points 2 days 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 2 days 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.