This is very interesting, so how do I use it?
So to try it here - Is there a remote-categories area somewhere?
For instance if I want to post to @medicine@mander.xyz where to select this?

@trwnh@mastodon.social said in Live testing of remote categories :
> one thing to watch out for is that not every Group represents something that can be mapped to a category

Sure, but they most of them also don't represent something that can be considered an individual. And it's way easier to treat a 'category' as a group than it is to treat a group as an individual.

@kichae i mean they're all actors as far as activitypub is concerned. what is a blog, if not a category by a different name?

@eeeee you'll want to search for the category (how, is outlined in the top post) to access it.

@trwnh@mastodon.social Sure, but in terms of usage, most group actors are going to be sharing collections of posts by multiple users that have some connection or commonality, which will far, far, far more commonly seem appropriate to map on to a category than anything else.

@julian said in Live testing of remote categories :
> You can now no longer mention a remote category. Instead, create your topic right in that category itself. As it should be .

Huzzah!

Now, are there any plans to support cross-posting?

@Kichae at some point, but that's a bit more niche of a use case. Doesn't mean there isn't use for it though. The underlying structure of NodeBB ties a topic to a single category, but supporting cross posting could be something we add on top of that.

@Kichae @trwnh@mastodon.social I'd be interested in seeing some examples of as:Groups that aren't better represented as a category vs a user.

I'm not saying that they don't exist, just that I don't know about them.

WP blogs are working well as categories although obviously posting to that remote category won't actually get you anywhere. So the UX doesn't work well on things like that.

@julian in common usage maybe not, but more generally then yes absolutely

i think the "category vs user" split can be rethought wrt actors, because as stated earlier the difference between a blog (category) and a forum (category) is basically nothing. you could just as easily treat every AP actor as both a category and a user; they are a user when they post and they are a category when you consider their posts. the thing is, right now, some actors primarily use only Announce, some use Create...

@julian i think ideally this would be explicitly signalled which objects represented a Feed or Category or Forum or Account or User or whatnot. but the question is how to get from here to there...

The search worked, it found the community, but there was no subscribe option.
When I tapped the bar that says number of current subscribers an error page showed !?

@eeeee to subscribe to a category, you will want to watch or track it, same as you would a regular category.

You're seeing that error because you're off-site, onto Lemmy.

@julian can you be specific in how to track it?
Although Ive found it I cant seem to follow / track that community.
What do I do? Apologies if Im being stupid, but Ive tried

@julian example using foaf and sioc...

```
id = f1
type = [as:Service, sioc:Forum]
as:summary = "Forum TF category"

id = g1
type = [as:Group, foaf:Group, foaf:Agent, sioc:User]
as:name = "AP Forum Task Force"
foaf:member = [Julian, a]

id = t1
type = [as:Collection, sioc:Thread]
as:summary = "Some thread"
sioc:has_container = f1

id = p1
type = [as:Event, sioc:Post]
as:name = "Meeting on April 2025"
sioc:has_container = t1
sioc:has_creator = g1
as:attributedTo = g1
```

Nice, but does this mean accounts on NodeBB can no longer mention categories at all?

Perhaps this was not its intended purpose, but being able to link to a category in a post by a handle is much more convenient than typing its entire URL - and that goes for both remote and local categories.

So I am not talking about creating a topic on remote categories by mentioning them, but rather trying to bring attention to their existence to a person that might not know about them.

E.g.
> @test1 Hey, you might want to check out @testing-ground ; there's lots of awesome content there.

> @test1 If you want to make a report, consider posting this to @bug-reports instead.

N.B. In my examples, I'm actually still able to mention local categories via a handle - so I did not type [[@testing-ground](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground)](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground), simply [@testing-ground](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground).

@AltCode I think being able to mention categories is handy. It was removed as a byproduct of the category no longer being a user, but it's not gone by design, no. It can come back.

@julian The way cross-posting works on Lemmy and Reddit is basically to copy the post, so there's not necessarily a reason to break the one-to-one mapping of posts-to-categories. (Though, actually, looking at Reddit, I think it's actually a new post with an internal link preview, rather than a wholesale copy of content as it is on Lemmy). But more advanced frameworks could be interesting

@eeeee no problem, what seems straightforward for me isn't always the case for others!

Below the category description, there is a bar that contains buttons for sorting the topic list. The first of those buttons controls whether you are watching or tracking the category. It usually corresponds to whether you see topics from that category in your unread and recent pages.

For remote categories, this controls whether or not you are following the category. If you are following the category, then topics posted in that category will show up in your unread page.

@trwnh@mastodon.social in general, if NodeBB discovers a group, it will create an (initially) empty category in order to house topics.

If in the course of that category's life, no topics actually make it in (i.e. if nobody addresses anything to it, nobody follows it, etc.) then it'll be pruned out as normal.

So if an as:Group contains users, and doesn't share or send creates, then it'll just be a little stub that goes nowhere, that's all.