Before there was social media, there have been web boards. Millions of discussion board websites proceed to function, which is why it’s notable that one prime discussion board software program supplier, NodeBB, is now becoming a member of the fediverse, also called the open social net.
The fediverse right now consists of apps like decentralized X rival Mastodon, Instagram different Pixelfed, an open YouTube competitor PeerTube, and others. These “federated” providers are powered by a protocol referred to as ActivityPub, which permits for decentralized social networking.
As customers started to shift away from centralized social media apps owned by billionaires like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk, the ActivityPub protocol has been adopted by a wider vary of software program purposes and providers. This consists of the ActivityPub integrations enabled by WordPress (and WordPress.com), Flipboard, Medium, and even Meta itself with its Instagram Threads app. Substack competitor Ghost is working to federate as nicely.
With NodeBB’s becoming a member of, discussion board operators will now even have the choice to affix the decentralized social net, too.
As NodeBB co-founder Julian Lam explains in a submit, the concept first happened in mid-2023 when he had the concept to attach NodeBB boards to one another. Initially, this was going to be a centralized service, he says. But whereas researching this idea additional, Lam got here throughout Mastodon and ActivityPub and realized that the venture could possibly be decentralized as a substitute.
In addition, funding from the NLNet Foundation allowed NodeBB to implement the ActivityPub protocol extra shortly. “Their funding was instrumental in offering the monetary stability to experiment with ActivityPub and to take part in developer circles, such because the SWICG, FediForum, and far more,” Lam wrote.
Going ahead, any new boards created with NodeBB will federate with the broader open social net mechanically. However, current clients could have the choice to work together with different NodeBB boards and another ActivityPub-powered software program, like Mastodon.
Unlike one other web discussion board answer, Discourse, the choice to federate shall be native to NodeBB, not simply an add-on.
“We opted to make this a core function as a substitute of a plugin, since there have been many modifications made to core to assist even the idea of accepting content material from exterior itself,” Lam famous in his announcement.
The new function is accessible in v4 of NodeBB and was already used to federate Lam’s announcement from NodeBB to Mastodon.
Lam tells TechCrunch that as a result of NodeBB is open supply software program, they don’t have numbers on utilization. (Plus, they struggle to not observe that info for privateness causes.) However, you will get a way of the tough depend by viewing the obtain counts for the default NodeBB theme. Though not a direct translation to the variety of NodeBB installs, the the venture was downloaded 4,582 occasions final week.
NodeBB at the moment powers discussion board websites like Opera, Moz, MLB: The Show, Bleeding Edge, The Daily WTF, Vivaldi, f.lux, and others.
