I should also mention that we had great conversations with the Mastodon team (hi @renchap@oisaur.com and @dave@upp2.com!), and their commitments to working towards better support for long-form text is evident.
Good vibes all around.
Among the fediverse there are microblogs (your Mastodons, Misskeys(+forks), etc.
Then there are the long form peeps. We managed to all find each other at FOSDEM 2025.
Pictured is @matt@writing.exchange (Write freely), @pfefferle@mastodon.social (WordPress), and yours truly (NodeBB). We also had some good conversations with @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz (Ghost), but I wasn't quick enough with my camera 😩
Let's move the state of long-form text on the open social web, forward!
@m_f@discuss.online good question! The threadiverse can be considered that software, plus other threaded-style software like NodeBB and Discourse. The working group includes members from most of those, in an effort to promote our own priorities forward to the fediverse at large 🙂
@Kichae I'm not seeing an issue (although I haven't done exhaustive testing) between my test instance and this site.
Can you let me know one of your federating categories, so I can try to set up a sync?
@projectmoon@forum.agnos.is yes, Lemmy has a local representation of this category, and sends the post here. I see that it's addressed to the category and automatically slot it in
@arachnibot@nodebb.arachnibot.com said in Is ActivityPub too complicated?: > Mainly wanted to sync remote group actors to a category for organizational purposes.
Yeah that's a great use case, and definitely what it ought to be used for. Let me look into nodebb-to-nodebb folllowing, that definitely should be working!
I opened an issue on Lemmy's repo
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5354
The thing is, what is the actual end-result you're looking for? It sounds like you want stuff from a remote lemmy community to be sent to your NodeBB. If that's the case, you could just follow the community as a user. Search for technology@lemmy.ml (for example) in the search bar, and once you follow the community, you will start seeing those posts in your /world feed.
The category synchronization options are for if you want to see a Lemmy community's posts in a category of your own. Might be that's what you want too.
But at present Lemmy doesn't support it :)
The logic is a little tricky to get right because there's a set sequence of steps that needs to happen in order for the group sync to succeed.
For example, between NodeBB and Lemmy:
If steps 1-3 succeed but 4-5 fail, then posts might be sent to NodeBB, but NodeBB will silently drop them because they're not addressed to anyone it thinks is following the sender.
@freamon thanks for the heads up about lemmy's accept shenanigans, I'll take that into account... or maybe ask Felix about it.
Lastly, there are so many others in the long-form text space who were not at FOSDEM, but are open and willing to work together!
@rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz (PieFed), @scott@authorship.studio (Hubzilla), Mike MacGirvin (whose handle I forget at the moment) and so many more.
Just because you weren't here does not mean you were forgotten. Your software was mentioned and discussed too!