If you have a Nodebb instance and want World posts to include a certain topic, lets say on electric cars.
If you follow people that are into electric cars then that happens.

(1) I cant seem to search on a topic in nodebb World.
So the way Ive been expanding the World, is by going to mastodon, searching topic, either by tag or by name. Then if I see an interesting profile, I reply to one of their posts with cc'ing in my nodebb account.
Then their post comes up in World on nodebb, and I can follow the author.
Hence this is a lot of moving around to follow people who are into a certain topic.

Is there a faster way? E.g. is there a method to type a topic in nodebb World, and see relevant posts or people there, and follow them immediately?

(2) When I follow someone from a Mastodon site, I seem to be following a clone of their account. I.e. account created 8 Nov 2022, 00:00, 1 post.
Not their mastodon profile with many posts and followers

@eeeee the way ActivityPub works is as you surmised, via follow relationships. I detail that bit here in the documentation, which I think you've read.

So the way Ive been expanding the World, is by going to mastodon, searching topic, either by tag or by name. Then if I see an interesting profile, I reply to one of their posts with cc'ing in my nodebb account.
Then their post comes up in World on nodebb, and I can follow the author.

To shortcut this, you can search either the author (@handle@domain) or post URL in NodeBB. From there, NodeBB will attempt to pull that content in via ActivityPub, so you don't need to reply to them.

Is there a faster way? E.g. is there a method to type a topic in nodebb World, and see relevant posts or people there, and follow them immediately?

Unfortunately not, since ActivityPub isn't built in a centralized way that allows for something like this. I face similar issues with the OpenBeta community. The rock climbing community is around on fedi, but finding them is tough. I do as you do, I follow people who post about climbing related content and over time my /world tends to populate with their content automatically.

What I also do on my site is follow a hashtag. In my case, #climbing. When followed, any new topics that are posted with that hashtag notify you, so you can move them out of world, etc.

Lemmy communities are also great to follow, because they automatically boost everything that happens in their community, so you can get access to everything that happens in that lemmy community automatically. (e.g. I follow @startrek@startrek.website here, and their posts show up in world automatically).

Lastly, I also follow a newsmast channel, @sport@newsmast.community, which also boosts a ton of related content. There is probably one for technology.

@eeeee said in Efficient way to increase World posts on a topic?:

(2) When I follow someone from a Mastodon site, I seem to be following a clone of their account. I.e. account created 8 Nov 2022, 00:00, 1 post.
Not their mastodon profile with many posts and followers

When you query a remote user, they are given a local representation in NodeBB. The creation date is different because it cannot always be trusted. If a remote user reports their creation date as 1 Jan 2588, I don't think that would be correct... but it is allowed in ActivityPub to do that :rofl: — so I just use the date they were first queried.

Re: searching,
I took a poster at random from World on here, stefan@stefanbohacek.online, and searched here and it found the account.
I searched on my instance, no matches.
Even though my instance follows me on this instance.
So the search doesnt seem to route through many connections?

@julian For me, discovering content from other servers is somewhat non-coherent in nodebb (as compared to mastodon and misskey) at the moment. On Sunday, I followed @thelinuxexperiment@tilvids.com (hosted on a peertube instance) on kokonnect -which is based on misskey , mastodon as well as here.
Today, when I opened community.nodebb.org(home as well as /world), there was no content from the thelinuxexperiment account, also the same thing happened in kokonnect.link . However, in mastodon the first post which I got was from thelinuxexperiment account(pic attached), also I could play the video inline without leaving mastodon and boost the post, and thus was completely satisfied.

Since, I did not find any post from thelinuxexperiment on my timeline in kokonnect.link, I searched the user on kokonect(since I was already following) and in that page I got all posts, could play the video inline as was also able to boost the video(pic attached), and so was partially satisfied

However, I got a poor experience here. I searched the user and did not find any posts, then I specifically opened the posts page but could not find any posts there also(pic attached), thereby leaving me completely unsatisfied

I got some nice and cheap dedicated hardware during black friday and would like to host two activitypub servers on it-one for video hosting and one for general discussion. For video hosting, I have decided to go with peertube. For general discussion, nodebb was my first preference and misskey the second one. However, without proper content following and discovering mechanism I will have no option but to go for misskey. So, requesting you that before the final release of v4 in January,2025 , please improve the content discovery mechanism, if not like mastodon at least make it similar to that of misskey.

@bh4-tech the screenshot you posted shows that your follow request to @thelinuxexperiment@tilvids.com was not approved, which is why you didn't receive any content from them.

I will double-check Peertube federation. I have not looked into it before.