@julian How do you deal with situations where the group actor also sends posts?

For example, on Hubzilla, (streams), and Forte, the top level post of a forum thread is from the forum, not the user. This was originally done for Mastodon compatibility since it did not understand threaded conversations and groups. They could follow the forum as if it were a user, and receive all of the forum posts. They could send a DM to the forum to create a new post.

NodeBB took a different approach, using boosts to distribute user posts to people who follow the forum. And I think you said you use mentions within a post to create a new top level post.

How are we handling the differences in approaches?

@scott@loves.tech can you share an example of a group actor from Hubzilla? Would be interesting to see how that's handled. Likely it wouldn't work properly because categories in NodeBB don't author posts.

Do your group actors send creates on behalf of regular users? That might work ok.

Lastly, there's no requirement that a NodeBB category be mentioned. It only needs to be addressed. A mention is the easiest way to do that because you addressing is abstracted out of the Mastodon UI.

But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you're able to change addressing based on where you create the post.

@julian I'm not sure. They changed things in the last major version when they adopted FEP 171b Conversation Containers.

Some examples of forum channels are @Hubzilla Support Forum and @Neuhub Support Forum .

@julian

But for things like PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, and likely Hubzilla, you're able to change addressing based on where you create the post.

Yes, in Hubzilla, we can click on the padlock and select who the post is addressed to, including NodeBB forums. I haven't tried it yet, but Hubzilla does recognize NodeBB categories as "forums."

@julian I just tried posting five different posts from Hubzilla to @Testing Ground via various methods, and none are showing up.

1. Post from a group actor, selecting audience from list.
2. Post from a group actor, using a mention.
3. Post from a normal actor, selecting audience from list.
4. Post from a normal actor, using a mention.
5. Post from a normal actor, posting to a Hubzilla Forum (group actor) and mentioning the NodeBB category in the post.

I am not sure if that forum is moderated, but none of my posts are showing up.

By the way, we also have a test forum set up here: @Neuhub Test Forum

#^https://neuhub.org/channel/testforum

https://community.nodebb.org/inbox    delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden    2025-03-30 22:51:57https://community.nodebb.org/inbox    delivery rejected: 403 Forbidden    2025-03-30 23:28:55

@scott@loves.tech Hubzilla is formatting its Notes in a manner I wasn't expecting.

• The group actor is the attributedTo, which is not possible in NodeBB
• The note itself is not addressed to the group actor, only its followers collection
• There is no way to discern without parsing the note content itself who authored the original note.

So at present while I would be able to retrieve the note, without a proper backreference to the group actor, I don't think I can slot it correctly.

Not sure why the received activity is returning a 403, as well.

Forgot to cc @mario@hub.somaton.com re: the above.

@julian @Mario Vavti  That is one thing that I wish Hubzilla did, and that is identify the author of the original note (top level post in a forum), both internally in the database and in a variable available to themes, and externally via Zot protocol and ActivityPub.

@julian in Hubzilla the group actor will fork the original post with a quote reshare. Hence attributedTo is set to the group actor. IIRC the author of the original post is being stored for refernce but we currently do not use this info.

@Scott M. Stolz

@mario@hub.somaton.com since Hubzilla posts (incl. yours) are making it in fine I'm assuming this is only for the "forum" feature?

@julian right.

@julian we have recently rewritten the addressing logic and it seems mapping the mentions to to for public toplevel posts has fallen short. After fixing this it seems to work fine now: #^https://community.nodebb.org/topic/cbbf1640-2295-4fc5-b86f-5b1fd259cccb/test2

@Scott M. Stolz

@mario@hub.somaton.com that's wonderful to hear! Thank you so much.

Some of the remote categories appear to be broken now.

These are the Flipboard magazines NodeBB is currently aware of when searching "flipboard " in the search page:

• [Tech News by @theverge@flipboard.com ](https://community.nodebb.org/category/tech-news-theverge@flipboard.com )
• [Musik News by @musikexpressde@flipboard.com ](https://community.nodebb.org/category/musik-news-musikexpressde@flipboard.com )
• [Gear by @engadget@flipboard.com ](https://community.nodebb.org/category/gear-engadget@flipboard.com )

However, that very first one (tech news by The Verge) does not work; going to it gives a 404 page instead.

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Something else appears to have happened to the Vivaldi Blog remote category (a WordPress blog). A week ago it was working fine, but now, searching for it lists it twice in the search page. Each listing indicates a completely different number of posts and topics for the remote category.

Even weirder though most of the topics that are correctly slotted into it, they are not actually in the category page, e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/a85b0eff-5219-46ba-9ad4-a5d417a7bec5/minor-update-2-for-vivaldi-desktop-browser-7.3

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Screenshots

Actually, I think I know what's going on with the Vivaldi blog group actor - it's not necessarily NodeBB's fault.

Inspecting the AP objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog , all the English-written blog posts have their as:audience field set to https://vivaldi.com/?author=0.

Meanwhile, every other blog post that is written in a different language instead have it set to https://vivaldi.com//?author=0, so for Japanese blog posts, for example, it is https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=0.

And all these URLs link to different group actors, but all of them have the same value on the preferredUsername and webfinger properties: blog, and blog@vivaldi.com.

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EDIT: Actually this also appears to be all actor objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog . E.g. if you start typing [@ruari@vivaldi.com](https://community.nodebb.org/user/ruari%40vivaldi.com) or search for it , you can see it be suggested twice too.

So my guess is that there are two person actors that NodeBB knows of that are claiming to be ruari@vivaldi.com: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46 and https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46.

This is probably a bug with the WPML+ActivityPub plugin combination they have going on.

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Screenshots

@AltCode okay! Thanks for reporting, it sounds like there are two issues going on:

1. Categories losing their handle-to-id association
   • Frustratingly, this read very similarly to #13283 , and both remote users and categories share similar logic. I have so far not been able to reproduce it at all on local development.
2. Separate users (different IDs) sharing the same preferredUsername.
   • This is an interesting one, and I am not entirely sure where the fault lies. I wonder how other software handles it?

@AltCode I forked this out to a new topic. I think it's time to loop @pfefferle@mastodon.social into the conversation (at the very least so this could be potentially escalated).

Mattias, it seems that when the WPML and ActivityPub plugins are enabled together, notes federated out by the blog user in another language have different ids but the same preferredUsername.

e.g. ruari@vivaldi.com: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46 and https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46

NodeBB interprets this as two different users. Curiously, Mastodon does not, the second ID explicitly does not resolve.

So there can be two solutions here:

1. The underlying issue can be fixed by WordPress, the solution of which is out of scope (for me at least)
2. NodeBB can adopt whatever mechanism Mastodon is using... which is most likely that Mastodon does a two-way when asserting an ID, and ensures that the webfinger resource points to the ID.