NodeBB is a popular open source platform for community forums, and can be compared to Discourse and Flarum. While the project has been dogfooding fede

NodeBB Officially Joins the Fediverse

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2025-01-21 08:30:06

NodeBB is a popular open source platform for community forums, and can be compared to Discourse and Flarum. While the project has been dogfooding federation support for months, the NodeBB v 4.0 release brings network interoperability to the forefront.

Julian Lam (@julian ) , one of NodeBB’s cofounders, has put in an extensive amount of legwork into adapting the software to the many different quirks between various different ActivityPub implementations, going as far as establishing ForumWG, a task force dedicated to standardizing how federated forums work together.

The funny thing about ActivityPub is that at the end of the day, the overarching goal of seamless communication breaks down any barriers between competing organizations. NodeBB and Discourse have been vying for the exact same market share (forums, community-building, self-started or enterprise) for over 10 years, and it was only after ActivityPub came around that the dev teams even started talking to one another. Funny how that works.

As a result, NodeBB is compatible with other community group platforms, such as Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed, and the ActivityPub Discourse plugin used by SocialHub. These different platforms still have some UX papercuts to address — for example, Lemmy doesn’t leverage Webfinger in its search function to look up content at a URL, whereas NodeBB does. Hopefully, cross-project collaboration can lead to fewer discrepancies between platforms.