Darkscribes Community

> that user and the category are (I think) separate actors.

@julian Yes, they are indeed separate actors. To be clear, [Tech News by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected]) is the group actor, while @[email protected] is the person actor/remote user, sorry if I caused any confusion.

> I'm not sure what the user does, shares its own posts, possibly...

As I understand Flipboard, users there can create as many magazines as they want, and any post they create must always be in a magazine. It is not possible to create a post that does not belong to a magazine.

When federating this means that each magazine that a user creates is discoverable as @[email protected]; any post that user creates will tag the magazine the post was made into, and the group actor representation of that magazine will boost/share/announce the post.

@julian Yeah, seems to just affect Flipboard.

> Can you find those items when you search their url or id in the NodeBB search bar?

Yes, I'm still able to find them, e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/post/https%3A%2F%2Fflipboard.com%2Fusers%2Ftheverge%2Fstatuses%2FDpM9mVh1Qk2oScowFAN8DA%3Aa%3A43611565

It's uncategorised, just as you said.

Slight tangent, no one seems to be following @[email protected] here on the forum.

@julian Something seems to be wrong. I've been following a few Flipboard magazines from NodeBB, but it seems like they are not correctly federating with the 4.3.0 beta.

Take a look at [Tech News by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected]), I've been tracking this remote category for almost a month now, but here on NodeBB, it is still empty. Meanwhile, on Mastodon I see new posts daily.

For the record, this is what an activity created by the group actor looks like:

{
   "@context":[
      "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
      "https://w3id.org/security/v1",
      {
         "Hashtag":"as:Hashtag",
         "toot":"http://joinmastodon.org/ns#",
         "discoverable":"toot:discoverable",
         "indexable":"toot:indexable",
         "alsoKnownAs":{
            "@id":"as:alsoKnownAs",
            "@type":"@id"
         }
      }
   ],
   "type":"Announce",
   "id":"https://flipboard.com/magazines/cPVtLWiDRgi0_eWFp_CJVA:m:43611565/activity/DpM9mVh1Qk2oScowFAN8DA:a:43611565",
   "actor":"https://flipboard.com/magazines/cPVtLWiDRgi0_eWFp_CJVA:m:43611565",
   "published":"2025-04-22T09:51:50Z",
   "to":[
      "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
   ],
   "cc":[
      "https://flipboard.com/users/theverge",
      "https://flipboard.com/magazines/cPVtLWiDRgi0_eWFp_CJVA:m:43611565/followers"
   ],
   "object":"https://flipboard.com/users/theverge/statuses/DpM9mVh1Qk2oScowFAN8DA:a:43611565"
}

This is getting out of hand! Now, there are six of them!

Actually, I think I know what's going on with the Vivaldi blog group actor - it's not necessarily NodeBB's fault.

Inspecting the AP objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog, all the English-written blog posts have their as:audience field set to https://vivaldi.com/?author=0.

Meanwhile, every other blog post that is written in a different language instead have it set to https://vivaldi.com//?author=0, so for Japanese blog posts, for example, it is https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=0.

And all these URLs link to different group actors, but all of them have the same value on the preferredUsername and webfinger properties: blog, and [email protected].

EDIT: Actually this also appears to be all actor objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog. E.g. if you start typing [@[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/user/ruari%40vivaldi.com) or search for it, you can see it be suggested twice too.

So my guess is that there are two person actors that NodeBB knows of that are claiming to be [email protected]: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46 and https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46.

This is probably a bug with the WPML+ActivityPub plugin combination they have going on.

Screenshots

Some of the remote categories appear to be broken now.

These are the Flipboard magazines NodeBB is currently aware of when searching "flipboard" in the search page:

• [Tech News by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])
• [Musik News by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])
• [Gear by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])

However, that very first one (tech news by The Verge) does not work; going to it gives a 404 page instead.

Something else appears to have happened to the Vivaldi Blog remote category (a WordPress blog). A week ago it was working fine, but now, searching for it lists it twice in the search page. Each listing indicates a completely different number of posts and topics for the remote category.

Even weirder though most of the topics that are correctly slotted into it, they are not actually in the category page, e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/a85b0eff-5219-46ba-9ad4-a5d417a7bec5/minor-update-2-for-vivaldi-desktop-browser-7.3

Screenshots

@julian Yes, I can confirm that the other bug has been fixed! There's no more guest accounts in my /following page.

It looks like they are indeed AP groups: https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected]

Some interesting bugs atm

All the ActivityPub groups I was following prior to this update were successfully migrated to become remote categories (good!), but now that they are no longer treated as remote users, this has left behind a bunch of "guest" users in my /following page.

Also due to the migration, a bunch of topics that used to be categorised under @activitypub, were automatically moved to [[@activitypub](https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub)@forum.wedistribute.org](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])!

I presume this happened because [[@activitypub](https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub)@forum.wedistribute.org](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected]) is set to mirror @activitypub. I'm guessing that since the group actor was sharing all these posts, once NodeBB recognised it as a remote category instead, it began to treating those share activities as move actions.

Seeing how NodeBB does not have a notion of topics belonging to multiple categories, you might want to revisit how you handle remote categories that follow and mirror local categories.

Nice, but does this mean accounts on NodeBB can no longer mention categories at all?

Perhaps this was not its intended purpose, but being able to link to a category in a post by a handle is much more convenient than typing its entire URL - and that goes for both remote and local categories.

So I am not talking about creating a topic on remote categories by mentioning them, but rather trying to bring attention to their existence to a person that might not know about them.

E.g.
> @test1 Hey, you might want to check out @testing-ground; there's lots of awesome content there.

> @test1 If you want to make a report, consider posting this to @bug-reports instead.

N.B. In my examples, I'm actually still able to mention local categories via a handle - so I did not type [[@testing-ground](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground)](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground), simply [@testing-ground](https://community.nodebb.org/category/4/testing-ground).