Last friday I quietly tagged a commit on the activitypub branch with v4.0.0-beta.1, which signals that the ActivityPub integration is now ready for beta testing.

For the most complete (yet readable) list of new functionality from the alpha, check out the “Road to Beta” project page.

tl;dr — some new features and a lot of fixes

  • Editing a category now issues an Update(Actor)
  • replies is now populated and responds with an OrderedCollection of direct replies (see the post about that)
  • Proper sharedInbox support
  • Better indicators for content that comes from non-local (aka “remote”) users
  • Conversational context synchronization mechanic (corresponding post for that)
  • Moving a topic out of the “uncategorized” category will now federate out an Announce

By and large most incompatibilties have been resolved, although if you do find some issues, please do let me know in the corresponding bug report thread.

I’m looking to wrap up the year with some of the more difficult projects I’ve put off

  • Object Integrity Proofs, which will also enable Inbox Forwarding
  • Better handling of “Open in App” signals from third-party instances
  • Post visibility support (or at least better handling so non-public messages aren’y unceremoniously dropped!)
  • Ongoing integration with FEPs 400e and 7888
  • KichaeEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I’ve been playing around with community.nodebb.org, in anticipation of 4.0’s launch, and I’ve noticed that the Lemmy groups I’ve followed don’t appear to be showing up. I can see posts from Mastodon (and whatever else) users that I’ve followed in World, but not Lemmy groups.

    Is this expected or intended? Following nodeBB topics from Lemmy has worked OK, so I thought it would be bidirectional.

    Though, now that I’m comparing this post on lemmy.ca to that on the mothership, I see that replies from nodebb.org users aren’t showing up on the remote instance, either. Just those from off-site users. I’m caught somewhat off guard by that, too. Is that behaviour expected?

      • Kichae@community.nodebb.org
        1·
        2 hours ago

        @julian said in NodeBB v4.0.0 Beta:

        whether a user from lemmy.ca follows a user here

        Hmm. That’s going to be a big issue for Lemmy federation, then, because Lemmy doesn’t even allow you to follow users, only groups. If that’s the case, this seems like a deeper compatibility issue, and probably is probably more of a feature update than a bug fix.

        • julian@community.nodebb.orgOP
          1·
          31 minutes ago

          @Kichae @[email protected] That’s an issue with all software federating via ActivityPub. If there isn’t an existing follow relationship then the content isn’t pushed to that user.

          That’s greatly simplifying it, of course. There’s quite a bit more that actually goes into how it works.

          In the case of the referenced topic, NodeBB automatically boosts replies that it receives from the category actor. When replies are made by NodeBB users, they are also addressed to everybody who has participated in the topic.

          So given that, lemmy.ca should have received everything, at least since you started posting in it. In reality, there might be a connection issue between NodeBB and Lemmy, and that’s what I’d want to verify first.