There have been some scattered feedback on a change I made for v4.0.0 that caught some people off-guard: Uploaded media is now shown in addition to topic thumbnails.

I'll start with why this change was made, and then solicit feedback.

The why

v4.0.0 introduced ActivityPub integration into NodeBB. This added dimension meant that content was consumed in a manner that was similar, but unfamiliar to NodeBB, and so much of the work involved normalizing that data into a format that made sense. (As an aside, I tell people that that's pretty much 99% of my job — glueing together APIs. I jest, but it's also basically true.)

One of those unfamiliar aspects was uploaded media in the form of attachments. NodeBB had discrete concepts of inline media and topic thumbnails, but attachments were something different entirely. Attachments were not inlined in the text (they tended to be added before or after the main content), and thumbnails were images only, while attachments could be lots of other things.

The second part was that a lot of the content I received relied on media to do the heavy lifting. Oftentimes the text would be minimal and in response to the attachment. After all, a picture's worth a thousand words.

Given those two things, I allowed NodeBB to consume and store attachments separately, and updated the topic thumbnail retrieval logic to pull media from both post attachments and inline media. That retrieval logic is what governs what you see next to the title. I also decided on the all-in approach because while NodeBB has multiple ways of slotting media, majority of ActivityPub software generally only uses attachments. This means both inline media and topic thumbnails were unceremoniously shoved into attachments when federating outward. There is movement toward changing this, and so this rationale may no longer make sense today.

I initially did have concerns that perhaps this would dilute the meaning and specificity of the "topic thumbnail", but I also wagered that the UX improvement of promoting any and all media found would be of greater benefit.

Your turn — feedback!

Maybe I'm wrong!

• Perhaps the media row is best used to showcase topic thumbnails and post attachments only (not inlined media.)
• Perhaps a configurable option would appease all folks (although I'm usually loathe to add options purely for that reason.)