Organizing the many worlds you're part of through NodeBB
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I'm curious about the possibility of using a NodeBB account as my main account for accessing and interacting with the fediverse.
One strength with forums I see is that they are more community- and interest oriented. They often have a clearer purpose.
My engagements with the world are different. I have many interests and different engagements. My "World" category reflects that.
I don't want to move things from World into the forum that hosts my account if that conversation doesn't fit the focus of the forum.
But I don't want to structure my world more, if I want to use my NodeBB account as my main handle on the fediverse.
I can't organize World right now.
Could I make a group on the forum with only me as member and then populate threads in different categories? I guess so. It would be a lot of categorizing.
More ideal would be if I could subscribe to categories on other NodeBB forums and then those categories would show even on my own instance - but just for me! Other folks on my instance haven't asked for that.
Say I'm interested in the @activitypub@community.nodebb.org category and would like to follow all new topics. I can subscribe to that category and get it into my world. A better solution would be that the category is there in my personal interface on my instance to organize the topics for me. Just like they do on the original instance where the category lives.
I'm writing this topic from the "Uncategorized" category of our own NodeBB forum. It's an example of me not knowing how I can start conversations on other NodeBB forums without having to create a new account on that forum (which then defeats the federation feature) or create that topic from an unrelated category on our own forum, which would then become spam.
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I'm curious about the possibility of using a NodeBB account as my main account for accessing and interacting with the fediverse.
One strength with forums I see is that they are more community- and interest oriented. They often have a clearer purpose.
My engagements with the world are different. I have many interests and different engagements. My "World" category reflects that.
I don't want to move things from World into the forum that hosts my account if that conversation doesn't fit the focus of the forum.
But I don't want to structure my world more, if I want to use my NodeBB account as my main handle on the fediverse.
I can't organize World right now.
Could I make a group on the forum with only me as member and then populate threads in different categories? I guess so. It would be a lot of categorizing.
More ideal would be if I could subscribe to categories on other NodeBB forums and then those categories would show even on my own instance - but just for me! Other folks on my instance haven't asked for that.
Say I'm interested in the @activitypub@community.nodebb.org category and would like to follow all new topics. I can subscribe to that category and get it into my world. A better solution would be that the category is there in my personal interface on my instance to organize the topics for me. Just like they do on the original instance where the category lives.
I'm writing this topic from the "Uncategorized" category of our own NodeBB forum. It's an example of me not knowing how I can start conversations on other NodeBB forums without having to create a new account on that forum (which then defeats the federation feature) or create that topic from an unrelated category on our own forum, which would then become spam.
@malte@forum.fedi.dk lots to unpack here. I'll try my best.
You certainly can use NodeBB as your main gateway to the fediverse. I do, with this account. I will admit that more "power user" features are not well represented yet.
The idea that there are disparate categories that ought to be visible/followable is an important one to implement, but also to get right.
Right now when you follow a category, it's represented as a user on NodeBB. That's just the way it was done, but as I sit with that decision daily I'm coming to the realization that that's not the ideal way to represent it. It is almost certainly my next focus for NodeBB.
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To that end, being able to browse additional forums from the comfort (and theme) of your own forum is quite desirable. It would be really interesting to see this play out with Lemmy communities and other forums focused on one specific topic.
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I post stuff to the Uncategorized category all the time, and it works decently well but suffers from a negative association by default.
Posting something to "uncategorized" seems slightly wrong, and I'm not sure whether it's nomenclatural or something else.
A much better UX flow would be for you to post directly to a remote category. 🤯
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@julian@community.nodebb.org sagde i Organizing the many worlds you're part of through NodeBB:
A much better UX flow would be for you to post directly to a remote category. 🤯
Yes, I think this is where Lemmy gets something right. Your world is already organized by the different contexts (in the sense of category and instance) that they take place in. Only parts of World is uncategorized - the stuff that comes form Mastodon for example.
It would be a really interesting improvement if the UX from your own instance reflected that. I agree with you that it's important to get it right and it is not simple! I tried to write out the first post to reflect a bit naïvely my own user experience and wishes for what I'd like to see happen if NodeBB was to become the main way to interact with the rest of the fediverse - something that I haven't seen a way to do before.
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One of the issues that I have with almost every other major Fediverse engine is that it can be summed up as "Big centralized commercial social media, but with a worse UX". They all ape the design language of centralized services, and then make them more complicated by federating. The biggest ones really seem to go out of their way to hide the fact that you're talking to people on other websites.
I have major issues with Mastodon's quite attempts to make every Mastodon website look exactly the same. But they're basically all guilty of trying to look like something they're not, in a way that fundamentally limits what the fediverse can be. Or really, what it really is.
Bulletin boards get to come at this problem from the totally opposite side. They are things that have always distributed, and their users don't have this expectation of having everything in one place all of the time. Neither NodeBB nor Discourse are trying to create a seamless, drop-in experience for Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram users, and because of that it opens up a huge design space. And also a hugely undefined design space.
I agree that /world is wanting. As a microblog space, it suffers from the forum post norms of title+body (something which has never made it into microblogging), with the result that many short-but-not-quite-short-enough posts require you to click through, only to get 3 or 4 more words than what were displayed in the auto-generated titile. As a remote forum space, it suffers from the disorganization mentioned here. But still, as a first step into this new mesh social network, there's something really, really cool about it.
But man, do I ever desperately want the bulletin board experience in /world. It really feels like what the fediverse was always meant to be, to me.
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One of the issues that I have with almost every other major Fediverse engine is that it can be summed up as "Big centralized commercial social media, but with a worse UX". They all ape the design language of centralized services, and then make them more complicated by federating. The biggest ones really seem to go out of their way to hide the fact that you're talking to people on other websites.
I have major issues with Mastodon's quite attempts to make every Mastodon website look exactly the same. But they're basically all guilty of trying to look like something they're not, in a way that fundamentally limits what the fediverse can be. Or really, what it really is.
Bulletin boards get to come at this problem from the totally opposite side. They are things that have always distributed, and their users don't have this expectation of having everything in one place all of the time. Neither NodeBB nor Discourse are trying to create a seamless, drop-in experience for Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram users, and because of that it opens up a huge design space. And also a hugely undefined design space.
I agree that /world is wanting. As a microblog space, it suffers from the forum post norms of title+body (something which has never made it into microblogging), with the result that many short-but-not-quite-short-enough posts require you to click through, only to get 3 or 4 more words than what were displayed in the auto-generated titile. As a remote forum space, it suffers from the disorganization mentioned here. But still, as a first step into this new mesh social network, there's something really, really cool about it.
But man, do I ever desperately want the bulletin board experience in /world. It really feels like what the fediverse was always meant to be, to me.
@Kichae said in Organizing the many worlds you're part of through NodeBB:
> But man, do I ever desperately want the bulletin board experience in /world. It really feels like what the fediverse was always meant to be, to me.I've been inspired by some teaser images from @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz's Ghost blog, which physically segregates microblogging content apart from long-form content (e.g. blogs).
Forum topics fit somewhere in the middle, although since title and body are present we tend to align more with long-form content.
It's a really neat idea I'd like to play around with more.
