Right now you're able to add remote categories to your world page. It's possible that we could allow admins to add remote categories to the forum index, although that'd be something we add later on.

I'm seeing issues with loading remote categories. I can't load the NodeBB bug reports category at all, and for the ActivityPub category, I can find it in my world category search, but I get a 404 when trying to load it. Also can't load general-discussion@community.nodebb.org for example.

It seems the NodeBB development board is the only one really federating for me. Any way I can solve this?

I am running beta2 of 4.3.0.

@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is hmm... could be a bug in the user migration code path.

Can you run your forum in dev mode (./nodebb dev) and try to load some of the categories here in your forum, and let me know if you see any errors in the console?

@julian@community.nodebb.org could not run it in dev mode directly because of docker compose, but did set NODE_ENV to development and got verbose logs. Only thing that shows up is:

2025-05-03T19:35:59.553Z [4567/53] - warn: Route requested but not found: /category/activitypub@community.nodebb.org

So, this URL does work: https://forum.agnos.is/category/nodebb-development@community.nodebb.org

Maybe it has something to do with the activitypub category being a sub-category of nodebb development?

@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is no, that didn't matter. There is no concept of nested categories in ActivityPub yet.

But the issue seems legitimate, I can't access the ActivityPub category from a test Mastodon server either.

@julian@community.nodebb.org I was able to access it from a Lemmy instance. So it is federating, at least partly. But interesting to know that Mastodon has issues with it...

One thing that might be helpful is that NodeBB gives an invalid ID error when trying to follow the category via the sync function in admin settings. Stack trace shows it's the error being thrown when trying to follow (activitypub.js line 43).

@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is thanks, can you try again? For whatever reason the handle-to-cid association was lost, and I'm not sure why. I've manually restored it now.

Yep, shows up now on my end. Maybe check other categories too?

Were there other categories breaking?

@julian@community.nodebb.org Yes, maybe? https://forum.agnos.is/category/bug-reports@community.nodebb.org for example. Maybe it's not federated? Since I don't see anything about what fediverse handle to use like in the ActivityPub forum.

That's correct, that category wasn't federating, but it is now

@julian@community.nodebb.org Cool, I can now load it. Another question: I have a bunch of lemmy communities (and also a few "null" entries) stuck on "pending" in the category synchronization settings. Pressing remote/delete doesn't do anything. Is there an easy way to get rid of them by editing the database?

Also, are there plans to merge the federation synchronization and new remote category following stuff together into one cohesive set of functionality?

@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is said in Updates to the world page:
>
>
> Also, are there plans to merge the federation synchronization and new remote category following stuff together into one cohesive set of functionality?

Yes... the remote category functionality supercedes the category sync functionality in some ways, but there is still a use case for it.

Most likely I will need to develop proper support for cross-posting (at least locally), and that would work well with the remote category functionality, so that topics are cross-posted to the synchronized category, instead of moved.