Forum specific UX for remote categories

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

The upcoming possibility of browsing to remote federated categories/communities has me thinking about interesting use cases for it.

Note that Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, and other "community-centric" software already do support this, so it's nothing new, I'm actually playing catch-up.

One interesting use case centers around NodeBB's /unread route, which tracks new topics since your last visit. Since ever, and even now in v4, this is only for local categories, but if you're able to "subscribe" to a remote category, then we could enable use of this page for that content too.

Think about waking up and seeing a self-curated feed of new content from your subscribed communities! There are some interesting parallels to RSS here, too.

What other forum-centric use cases do you think would be enhanced by the ability to browse remote categories?

[eeeee@community.nodebb.org]

If a site has a 'niche' theme and you want to find people with likeminded interests out in the Fediverse, the searching would be useful.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Mastodon doesn't seem to have categories, Ive only seen it on Lemmy.
In a way a category on Lemmy is like a nodebb instance, as most nodebb instances are for a certain area.
So one might argue that posting on a particular nodebb forum is akin to posting on a Lemmy category?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@eeeee a forum is usually structured around a common theme, yes. For example, community.nodebb.org is centred around support/discussion for NodeBB.

However, nothing stops someone from creating a general-interest forum, and that's why I prefer to think of NodeBB categories as like Lemmy communities.

You are correct in that Mastodon does not have the concept of categories. In fact that have not much concept of organization of content outside of reply-trees, and that is partly by design and partly by the constraints from the microblogging style.

[kichae@community.nodebb.org]

@eeeee @julian There are topic-specific Lemmy-based websites. startrek.website, ttrpg.network, etc. exist, and function much more like a traditional forum than a catch-all "general purpose" social networking or social media aggregation site, like Facebook or Reddit.

And I personally have argued, and continue to argue, that the Reddit model doesn't really work on the Fediverse. That the desire to create a simulacrum of large scale, centralized social media doesn't really scale well once you have multiple websites, and that focusing on a local-first framework is the more logical and more sustainable model long term.

I don't think modeling Lemmy communities as being the equivalent of an entire nodeBB website will stand the test of time. The idea that the hosting website matters continues to seep into the thinking of many Lemmy users, and so it should matter to non-Lemmy websites, too.

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People on Lemmy sometimes ask if there's a way to view communities by hosting site. This is a view that the Reddit-like UI has no natural way of supporting, but forums do. I would love to be able to see remote groups listed as categories in sub-forums ('sections' seems to be the nodeBB jargon?)

I've brought up elsewhere, too, about being able to create my own categories-style layout in /world; assigning remote groups to my own pseudo-sections would be amazing. Having the option to have these personalized pseudo-sections show up in the main categories view would be even better.

I've also mentioned in the past having a way for regular forum users to 'boost' posts from /world into official forum categories. There are a couple of ways to imagine this, with the most straightforward being just moving/copying the topic into the category, just as admins can currently do. But there's also the cross-post feature from Reddit/Lemmy, where there's a back-link to the original post, and the content displayed in a block quote. I see value in both of those options, though I can't imagine any given forum would want to support both.

User pseudo-categories could even be shareable. There's no reason they need to be strictly private (though, of course, users should be able to choose to make them so, if they were shareable). They'd functionally be like lists on Twitter, or custom feeds on Reddit, but with a section/category UI. Or not, I guess -- they could be treated as feeds, too, but I'm kinda sorta very, very over "feeds", personally.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@Kichae I worked on this for most of this week. You can follow along with that effort here:

Ability to browse remote categories · Issue #13255 · NodeBB/NodeBB

Description Currently, NodeBB processes the main actor types (Application, Group, Organization, Person, and Service) into "remote users", who can be followed and whose content appear in /world. A non-insignificant part of the open social...

GitHub (github.com)

How exactly to integrate categories into the NodeBB UX is an interesting question. It's one thing to be able to render a remote as:Group actor as a category, and I think we'd want it to be searchable as well (otherwise how would you find them?)

That's the baseline.

Being able to customize your /world page with a selection of subcategories is really interesting... I am not sure I'd want to allow users to customize the /categories page, so /world seems like a nice place for it.

Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

[kichae@community.nodebb.org]

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories:
Well, this sounds absolutely amazing.

> Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

Oh, that would be my personal preference, and I imagine it would be what many others looking for a federated forum would prefer, too. Forums are semi-curated spaces, after all. The only reason allowing users to customize their view of /categories is I think it might be what users who grew up with big social would expect. Like, a lot of ex-redditors using Lemmy-based websites seem to actively resent the idea that the local website should be meaningful in any way, or that they should engage with anything other than their f.

But it's probably not what's best for the forum. Nor for the fediverse.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@Kichae my fear is that adding in the ability for users to customize the forum index with dilute the importance of local categories.

I'm always a big supporter of community building, and while I am very appreciative of the network effects of activitypub, there is the other local community building side that I would want to keep top of mind as well.

[Gast]

@julian said in Forum specific UX for remote categories:
> Maybe users can "pin" remote categories to their world page. Would that work?

My thinking was that all the remote categories you follow are listed in your /world page - as opposed to being mixed alonside your followed accounts in your /user//following page.

But being able to pin the ones you most care about actually sounds good too.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode said in Forum specific UX for remote categories:
> My thinking was that all the remote categories you follow are listed in your /world page

That might get a little hairy if you follow a lot of categories.

Right now posts from any categories you follow would still show up in your world feed. If you follow a remote category, you would essentially be "tracking" the category, in NodeBB parlance. New topics and posts would show up in your /unread and /recent. If you "watch" the category, then you'll be notified of every new topic.