So I decided to set up a nodeBB server on a VPS and am trying to get everything set up - and I am trying to get the fediverse working. I have a couple of questions for anyone who might have some experience.

1. I am using cloudflare for the domain host, and it seems that I need to turn off bot fighting in order for the federation to work. Is this actually the case, or is there something I am doing wrong? If it is the case, is it that big of a deal? Will I get a lot of spam or bot traffic? Is there a custom rule I can make that night not be as good as bot fighting, but mitigate it slightly? (Without paying for additional cloudflare services) I'm not sure what I'm doing with cloudflare tbh, I've just been asking an LLM to help me correctly set it up.

2. I think I have it working, but I followed my piefed account within my nodeBB profile to test it - and while my profile shows that I am following the piefed account, the actual indicator that shows number of people following remains at 0. (See photos. On mobile atm, but it's the same on the desktop.)

3. How does the federation actually work - I'm new to the fediverse, but I'm curious of how to actually use nodeBB with the fediverse. Is /world for people to simply use the forum as a hub to browse their other feeds? Is there also a way to set up each category posting to specific instances? What is the "standard" or "expected" way to integrate the forum into the fediverse - and can it be used to help bring new members to the forum?

Sorry if some of this is trivial, slowly trying to navigate and wrap my head around things. Hopefully someone on here has some experience with this?

Hello! I'll try my best to answer your questions :)

1. I honestly don't know what to do about this. I briefly played around with CloudFlare rules to get federation working, and settled on the configuration I talk about here: https://community.nodebb.org/post/105742 I later de-activated it and just set up anubis as well (although because anubis is protected by anubis, good luck getting an LLM to help you set it up LOL)
2. The following indicator is a little wonky, you should just ignore it until I fix it :stuck_out_tongue: as long as your piefed account shows up in the page itself (/following), you're ok.
3. /world is a feed of content from the wider fediverse. It's like a home timeline in Mastodon where it will show you content from the people you follow or content shared by your followers.
   • You should think of categories like Lemmy/Piefed communities. Instead of setting up a category to post to specific instances, you should post your content to that specific community itself (you can go to it via the /world page, by searching for its handle)
   • You can then cross-post that remote topic back to your forum. Cross-posting only works that way right now because there is no standardized way to federate cross-posts across instances, yet.

The easiest way to integrate your forum into the fediverse is to set up some relays and use the FediBuzz relay to listen to some hashtags. You can then set up auto-categorization rules to bring those discussions into your categories. I recognize that this sounds overly complicated, I will publish some tutorials and guides about this soon so I have a better reference for it.

Easiest way to integrate your forum into the threadiverse is to just start posting. Post to other categories on other instances... encourage people to add your categories (I guess?) and it'll start showing up in peoples' home feeds.

I'm not exactly sure what people do on the threadiverse when they want to start a new community... lemmy-federate maybe, but NodeBB is not compatible with it yet.

Thank you!

Thank you.

1. I'll definitely check out Anubis and your configuration to see if it will work for my scenario.
2. Ok, good to know - if it's simply a bug then that that's fine, mostly I wanted to make sure it wasn't an indicator that something deeper was broken or getting blocked in the communication.
3. Sorry, I used the term instance when I meant community. But it sounds like the federation is more so to bring traffic into the forum, rather then out. Did I understand that correctly? If that is the case, then I may not opt to use it - as I was originally hoping for a way to push forum content into communities. I'll explore this further I guess - because I'm unfamiliar with relays and fedibuzz.

Overall, I appreciate the detailed response :)

[Edit, for archival purposes]: I looked into Anubis, and it looks like a great option, but I have my nodeBB forum installed via Cloudron, and just a quick rudimentary search reveals that it may be difficult to set up alongside Cloudron. This post: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/13957/deploying-anubis-ai-crawler-filtering-on-a-cloudron-server/7 shows an example of using a second vps to accomplish it, but ...well it requires a second vps. If anyone comes up with a solution in the future and stumbles across this post, I'd love to hear how you worked it out.

> @unfinishedprojects@piefed.zip said in NodeBB forum federation questions.:
>
> But it sounds like the federation is more so to bring traffic into the forum, rather then out. Did I understand that correctly?

NodeBB is a two-way ActivityPub server, which means that it pushes content out to the wider fediverse, as well as allowing you to discover new content via followers and /world.

So for your use-case, NodeBB is still a good way to push forum content into communities. You can even set up NodeBB so that your forum index doesn't contain any local categories, but is actually made up of remote categories!

For example, look at https://activitypub.space, under the "Related Communities" section, contain a couple of sub-categories which are actually Lemmy and Piefed communities. So you are able to just post there if you have content to share :)

Ok, that's good news!
Also, I checked the activitypub.space, and see they have a related communities section, but it wasn't clickable for me (maybe it just requires login, or some other simple issue inm missing) - regardless that is a great feature and might be a good way to pull content into the forum without muddying the content within my primary categories. :)

Related Communities is just a header, the related communities themselves are listed below that header :)

Yeah, but it was empty for me. Might require login or something. Or maybe there are just no related communities?

Eh, either way - not a big deal lol

Oh! That looks to be a bug too.

Well, I'm glad I wasn't crazy then. :)

Because you mentioned it might be a bug, I want to see if I am doing this correctly:

It says pending, and I remember this was one of the issues when I had bot fight mode on in cloudflare and the following of user profiles wouldn't work in /world.

Is this the similar to the same issue?

Is this how I would correctly be adding an incoming community to a "similar Communities" section?

To add a remote community to your forum index, you'll want to go to ACP > Manage > Categories

Under the "Add Category" dropdown, you can select the option to add a remote category.

Then you can treat them like any other category (re-order, rename, etc.)

The page you're on now, the category synchronization, allows a category to follow another category, and automatically cross-post its posts to that category. It also kind of does what you want, but it'll be more straightforward to add the remote community directly.

Oh, I'm dumb - that makes more sense. Thank you!