Standing up @nodebb on #Docker with #MongoDB.

A little while ago I was discussing with @raf the things I am looking for in online interaction that I'm not getting from traditional or federated social media. A lot of different things came up, but the most important and central is this:
the need to be able to have deep, complex conversations with people I trust, in a way that those conversations are not ephemeral, lost in the endlessly scrolling feed, like an infinite dark plain in which attention is but a circle of candlelight—but permanent, archived, accessible.

This is because I want to be able to collaborate with people to create ideas, with complexity and nuance, for which it's necessary to be able to build on the past and plan for the future.

What suggested itself was an Internet forum.

Deploying NodeBB on Docker with MongoDB

My friends and I need an Internet forum, to be able to have deep, complex conversations with people I trust, permanent, archived, and accessible.

Russian To Conclusions (marctrius.net)

#SelfHosting #Forum #Docker #VPS

@alter_kaker @nodebb

As far as fediverse stuff goes goes, that's generally more how Lemmy works, but I do sometimes miss the simplicity that was forums.

@dyamalos Right. @nodebb actually has federation as of v4 that went out yesterday, but I disabled it. I think that in some ways federation is just not what we're looking for here

Although I'm looking forward to seeing how the really great reputation and moderation features—something that's still sorely lacking on the Fedi—that NodeBB has will interact with federation. But for now I'm excited for some online-community building in a sheltered environment.

@alter_kaker @dyamalos @nodebb Please let this come to be. I want a forum. I want to moderate a forum like I did on AOL boards in the mid 90’s. I have women who used to have long, deep, complex conversations that changed our lives who would do it again. We are all 60-70 years old, but are still connected, however tenuous now.

After AOL died we moved to an email list. 50 of us for years talked daily. But the boards for threaded topics was so much better.

@MiriShuli @alter_kaker @dyamalos it certainly has come to pass! Federated forums are now a thing with #nodebb

@nodebb
Yep. We have federation disabled for now but it's definitely there if we want it.

Is there a whitelisting option for federation, if we only want to federate with a few known instances?
@MiriShuli @dyamalos

@alter_kaker yes! Thanks to @jdp23 asking about it months ago, we do have the ability to allow/denylist instances by domain.

A big deal -- I've tried it out both ways and it works well! It takes a list of domains so you need to do a bit of editing on standard Mastodon-compatible blocklists but it's very straightforward.

@nodebb@fosstodon.org @alter_kaker@hachyderm.io

Also @alter_kaker@hachyderm.io you can control which categories do and don't federate. So most of https://discussions.thenexus.today/ is private, but there's also a "public" category (with several subcategories). It's great for combining the private community-building discussions with broader more public discussions -- and I'm pretty sure you can even federate the public discussions to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed!

@nodebb@fosstodon.org

@jdp23@blahaj.zone good point!

@jdp23@blahaj.zone I just tried one of your public categories, but couldn't get a webfinger response:

curl -H 'accept: application/json' https://discussions.thenexus.today/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:federation-testing@discussions.thenexus.today

returned 'Not found'

For comparison:

curl -H 'accept: application/json' https://community.nodebb.org/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:activitypub@community.nodebb.org | jq .

returns a response that lets other federated platforms find the category using the familiar group@server syntax

Thanks for letting me know, @freamon@community.nodebb.org ... @julian@community.nodebb.org, any idea what's going on here?



@nodebb@community.nodebb.org

@jdp23@blahaj.zone I can't speak to @tankerkiller125's board but I'll take a look at yours.