The logic is a little tricky to get right because there's a set sequence of steps that needs to happen in order for the group sync to succeed.

For example, between NodeBB and Lemmy:

1. NodeBB admin tries to follow a Lemmy community
2. NodeBB marks the follow as pending
3. Lemmy records NodeBB as a follower
4. Lemmy community tried to send an Accept back
5. NodeBB marks the follow as established.

If steps 1-3 succeed but 4-5 fail, then posts might be sent to NodeBB, but NodeBB will silently drop them because they're not addressed to anyone it thinks is following the sender.

@freamon thanks for the heads up about lemmy's accept shenanigans, I'll take that into account... or maybe ask Felix about it.

@arachnibot @FrankM

@julian

Got it! Restored my database last night, but yeah it seems even a re-follow didn't get much to my category actor (outside of manually federating a share from my old mastodon)

Oh wait, I just realized I never shared the webfinger for the actor. mentioned below
@test@nodebb.arachnibot.com

I opened an issue on Lemmy's repo

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5354

The thing is, what is the actual end-result you're looking for? It sounds like you want stuff from a remote lemmy community to be sent to your NodeBB. If that's the case, you could just follow the community as a user. Search for technology@lemmy.ml (for example) in the search bar, and once you follow the community, you will start seeing those posts in your /world feed.

The category synchronization options are for if you want to see a Lemmy community's posts in a category of your own. Might be that's what you want too.

But at present Lemmy doesn't support it

@julian@community.nodebb.org Oh I think I get you? I Mainly wanted to sync remote group actors to a category for organizational purposes.

In my exact case it would be to collect foreign group actors together so me and my pals can have a more conglomerated niche feed (i.e the games category has posts from local and remote groups sharing stuff about games). Sort of like mastodon's lists, but with cleaner organization. (if you need a more practical example let me know!)

I've got lemmy instances working in my /world feed, so that's good news, at least. Though, it doesn't seem I can follow other nodebb categories with my testing ground either. (for instance, https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub responds with pending as well, even if the other actors are removed from the category's following requests)

Thank you either way! I know activitypub support been a big goal of yours, so I really appreciate all the hard work!

@arachnibot@nodebb.arachnibot.com said in Is ActivityPub too complicated?:
> Mainly wanted to sync remote group actors to a category for organizational purposes.

Yeah that's a great use case, and definitely what it ought to be used for. Let me look into nodebb-to-nodebb folllowing, that definitely should be working!