ActivityPub

For some reason, I'm unable to view the profile page of certain remote accounts here at community.nodebb.org.

So far, I've only noticed it with some accounts from my Mastodon instance - particularly, my own account, @[email protected], and the @[email protected] account, which should be viewable at https://community.nodebb.org/user/[email protected] and https://community.nodebb.org/user/[email protected] respectively. Instead, trying to go to either of those profile pages produces a 404 error; it's weird though, because these accounts used to work fine before.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to report this. I considered creating an issue on the GitHub repo, but at the moment I have no idea if it can affect accounts from other instances (let alone, other activitypub software), or only those from social.vivaldi.net.

Will this work?

Looking through my logs it seems that NodeBB doesn't have any defined User Agent for it's ActivityPub requests.

Mastodon has Mastodon/<version> (athing; +https://<websitehere>) Friendica has Friendica/<version> +https://<website>

And many more other federated software have similar things. But when looking through my web request logs I'm not seeing any specific User Agent for NodeBB forums. The only one in fact that I've found which might be NodeBB is node-fetch.

I'm asking simply because I have a tool that monitors specifically for ActivityPub requests from various clients. And I'd like to be able to track NodeBB ActivityPub requests as well, but I'm not seeing how at the moment.

There have been some reports (@bh4-tech I believe?) that NodeBB does not successfully federate with Threads. Looking into the issue, I discovered that it is only this domain community.nodebb.org that is unable to get/send activites with Threads.net.

After some help from @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected], I have discovered that our domain has been blocked by Threads for not serving up a public feed.

This is the feed they're specifically looking for. If your application does not serve it, it will be automatically blocked at some point. There is an appeal form you can fill out so your server can be re-instated.

• At this time, Threads seems to see the lack of the public feed as a non-starter for AP federation.
• As an AP software implementor, in order for admins running NodeBB to not have their servers auto-blocked, I will have to implement this API
• Threads relying on the existence of a Mastodon-specific API suggests that they're federating with Mastodon only (perhaps as part of a limited experiment), or that it is an oversight that needs to be fixed on their end with time.

Therefore if you wish for your NodeBB to federate with Threads, my guidance at this time is to whitelist your domain with Threads directly by filling out the form.