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.
Were there other categories breaking?
@julian@community.nodebb.org Yes, maybe? https://forum.agnos.is/category/bug-reports@community.nodebb.org for example. Maybe it's not federated? Since I don't see anything about what fediverse handle to use like in the ActivityPub forum.
That's correct, that category wasn't federating, but it is now :+1:
@julian@community.nodebb.org Cool, I can now load it. Another question: I have a bunch of lemmy communities (and also a few "null" entries) stuck on "pending" in the category synchronization settings. Pressing remote/delete doesn't do anything. Is there an easy way to get rid of them by editing the database?
Also, are there plans to merge the federation synchronization and new remote category following stuff together into one cohesive set of functionality?
@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is said in Updates to the world page: > > > Also, are there plans to merge the federation synchronization and new remote category following stuff together into one cohesive set of functionality?
Yes... the remote category functionality supercedes the category sync functionality in some ways, but there is still a use case for it.
Most likely I will need to develop proper support for cross-posting (at least locally), and that would work well with the remote category functionality, so that topics are cross-posted to the synchronized category, instead of moved.
@julian@community.nodebb.org It would be good for outgoing posts if cross posting is used for synced categories. But it doesn't solve the problem of incoming posts. For that, it would make sense to still slot incoming posts based on the sync setup. But there is still the problem of Lemmy not accepting follows from category actors.