I tried out NodeBB following Lemmy/PieFed communities

[johnnyenzyme@piefed.social]

Someone help me out? I barely know a thing about NodeBB, other than it's evidently software that integrates in to the FV. But if we're coming from Lemmy, PieFed and MBin instances, how would we access NodeBB instances and content..?

[die4ever@retrolemmy.com]

this is a NodeBB community/category: https://thefedi.forum/category/1/announcements

Put it in your Lemmy/PieFed search and you should be able to subscribe to it like any other community, when I searched for that URL I saw it has the ID: !announcements@thefedi.forum

[johnnyenzyme@piefed.social]

So as I understand it, right now it's still sort of a 'hunt and peck' situation. Lemmy and PieFed automatically federate their content with each other (well, to a healthy extent), but don't happen to be exposed to Mastodon, Mbin, and NodeBB content.

I hope progress can be made on uniting these, as the communities are all fairly modest in size, putting them well behind other platforms like Reddit, and the despicable "X."

[die4ever@retrolemmy.com]

yea it's manual, but if any community was big enough then people would know about it and hopefully post it to !newcommunities@lemmy.world

[openstars@piefed.social]

Lemmy and PieFed are both part of the Threadiverse though, whereas things like Mastodon, Loops, and Friendica are not. Since none of the latter have "communities", e.g. in Mastodon you have to follow "people", rather than community topics to be discussed by many people.

These fundamental differences can make it difficult to share content between platforms, even though it can be done. e.g. I think in Mastodon (iirc, I have never used it personally) you have to tag the community name as if it were a person.

Even between PieFed and Lemmy there is a lot that can be sent out by the former that the latter simply is not capable of receiving properly, like hashtags, polls, user and community flairs, and so on. Likewise some input can be filtered too, e.g. votes prevented on a PieFed community not only based on if someone is banned or not (from either the instance or the community itself) but whether they are a subscribed member of that community, if the community rule is set up that way (e.g. women's communities where men might not bother reading the rules, say by just seeing something while browsing by All, and attempt e.g. vote manipulation, even/especially unintentionally).

So anyway, despite all the differences, PieFed and Lemmy at least are operating on roughly the same wavelength, but e.g. Loops is an entirely separate thing.

[johnnyenzyme@piefed.social]

Lemmy and PieFed are both part of the Threadiverse though, whereas things like Mastodon, Loops, and Friendica are not. Since none of the latter have “communities”, e.g. in Mastodon you have to follow “people”, rather than community topics to be discussed by many people.

Okay, but Mastodon does have a general feed I think, similar to the "ALL" stream. Doesn't it also allow following hashtags, too?

Even between PieFed and Lemmy there is a lot that can be sent out by the former that the latter simply is not capable of receiving properly, like hashtags, polls, user and community flairs, and so on.

I think there's another wrinkle, too, about PF communities not showing up in Lemmy feeds unless a local instance user has subscribed to them.

[mesamunefire@piefed.social]

Oh this is cool!

[openstars@piefed.social]

You seem more familiar with Mastodon than me:-).

I think there’s another wrinkle, too, about PF communities not showing up in Lemmy feeds unless a local instance user has subscribed to them.

Mostly this is just how the Threadiverse is designed to work. PieFed might do differently, but Lemmy has always been this way. That said, it is reportedly about to get worse/better (at the same time) as the choice as to what communities will show up for new instances will now fall under the centralized authority of Lemmy.ml directly - so e.g. anything defederated from it will no longer be considered part of the Threadiverse, at least by default (although that's easy enough to override by adding the community manually). It is notable though that previously I believe zero communities were added by default, at least automatically (and yet when that update deploys and some do, it will only get more confusing to find out why some instances, decided by Lemmy.ml to not be worthy by their criteria, will not be part of that). It is also far more confusing than I let on here, and in ways that I do not fully know myself, since just because an instance is "aware" of a community does not mean that it is "subscribed" to it.

There is simply no way that the federated model is anything at all like "just using email", as people claim. The defederations make it an entirely different thing where instead of having a fully connected graph we have only a partially connected one.

[johnnyenzyme@piefed.social]

That all sounds pretty gloomy, on the whole.

If Lemmy.ml's founders didn't have such a controversial reputation, I'd be a lot more sanguine about all that...

[julian@activitypub.space]

@die4ever@thefedi.forum hi from another NodeBB! (god this will never get old)

NodeBB maintainer here. Glad to hear you're enjoying the software! I really tried to make it so that federation is rather seamless. There's a lot of work to be done with respect to discovery, so it'll only get better over time 🙂