NodeBB v4.0.0 — Federate good times, come on!
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After nearly a full year in development, NodeBB v4.0.0 has landed, bringing federation between NodeBB instances (and a connection to the wider fediverse of social media) to forum software.
Fediverse! Here's a TechCrunch primer about it, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that NodeBB plugs in to a wider social network so that you don't have to cultivate an audience, they're already there.
It was back in mid-2023 when I had the initial idea of interconnecting NodeBB forums. Back then, I had far smaller ambitions... I wanted a singular NodeBB to be able to communicate with other forums running NodeBB. To do that, we'd need to build out a centralized service to act as a bridge between instances, and corresponding slim clients on individual installs to consume the relayed data. At the time, concept like decentralization were not even part of my thought process.
It was during this period when I was doing my research that I stumbled on Mastodon, and later, ActivityPub, the protocol that powers it all. Since then, it's been one wild ride getting NodeBB to speak the same language.
