tl;dr — you can now find remote categories and see your tracked/watched categories in /world.
A new alpha version of NodeBB was tagged today: v4.3.0-alpha.3. The biggest change is to the /world route, which up until now showed a list of topics from outside of the local NodeBB instance.
New to this alpha release:
- A quick search widget was added, allowing you to directly search for remote categories. There is no need to navigate to to the search page to discover new categories.
- Your list of tracked and watched categories will show at the top of the page.
- "Tracking" and "Watching" categories—both local and remote—is how content discovery happens in NodeBB. Tracked categories will have new content show up in the "unread" page, while watched categories take that a step further and notify you when new content is posted.
- Tracking and watching a category will tell NodeBB to subscribe to that remote community for updates
At this time we're continuing to look for stability issues with the remote category integration. We'll be working on QoL fixes as we move into the beta phase this/next week.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml Mostly what I've observed is significant instances of timing out when trying to find communities on new instances from non-Lemmy-based websites, something that hasn't been notable from Lemmy-to-Lemmy first encounters. From the outside, it points to y'all doing some kind of compensation for possible AP issues.
I know I said "Lemmy is rough around the edges", but I really meant "ActivityPub is rough around the edges". Lemmy's just the hegemon in the AP categorized content space.
In principle that sounds like a problem with NodeBB or other platforms you are using. Lemmy doesnt do anything special to fetch remote communities. But if you notice any error responses served by Lemmy you can open an issue.