Before there was social media, there were internet forums. Millions of forum sites continue to operate, which is why it’s notable that one top forum software provider, NodeBB, is now joining the fediverse, also known as the open social web.
The fediverse today includes apps like decentralized X rival Mastodon, Instagram alternative Pixelfed, an open YouTube competitor PeerTube, and others. These “federated” services are powered by a protocol called ActivityPub, which allows for decentralized social networking.
As users began to shift away from centralized social media apps owned by billionaires like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk, the ActivityPub protocol has been adopted by a wider range of software applications and services. This includes the ActivityPub integrations enabled by WordPress (and WordPress.com), Flipboard, Medium, and even Meta itself with its Instagram Threads app. Substack competitor Ghost is working to federate as well.
With NodeBB’s joining, forum operators will now also have the option to join the decentralized social web, too.
As NodeBB co-founder Julian Lam explains in a post, the idea first came about in mid-2023 when he had the idea to connect NodeBB forums to each other. Initially, this was going to be a centralized service, he says. But while researching this concept further, Lam came across Mastodon and ActivityPub and realized that the project could be decentralized instead.
In addition, funding from the NLNet Foundation allowed NodeBB to implement the ActivityPub protocol more quickly. “Their funding was instrumental in providing the financial stability to experiment with ActivityPub and to participate in developer circles, such as the SWICG, FediForum, and much more,” Lam wrote.
Going forward, any new forums created with NodeBB will federate with the wider open social web automatically. However, existing customers will have the option to interact with other NodeBB forums and any other ActivityPub-powered software, like Mastodon.
Unlike another internet forum solution, Discourse, the option to federate will be native to NodeBB, not just an add-on.
“We opted to make this a core feature instead of a plugin, since there were many changes made to core to support even the concept of accepting content from outside itself,” Lam noted in his announcement.
The new feature is available in v4 of NodeBB and was already used to federate Lam’s announcement from NodeBB to Mastodon.
Lam tells TechCrunch that because NodeBB is open source software, they don’t have numbers on usage. (Plus, they try not to track that information for privacy reasons.) However, you can get a sense of the rough count by viewing the download counts for the default NodeBB theme. Though not a direct translation to the number of NodeBB installs, the the project was downloaded 4,582 times last week.
NodeBB currently powers forum sites like Opera, Moz, MLB: The Show, Bleeding Edge, The Daily WTF, Vivaldi, f.lux, and others.
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After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a custom feed for videos on its platform. Now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of that move to introduce a video feed of its own.
Initially, Surf’s video feed was a combination of video posts on Bluesky’s “trending video” feed and those posts that included the hashtag #SkyTok. The company says it will soon personalize its feed to the end user, too.
This will help differentiate Surf’s video feed from Bluesky’s own. It also represents the power that comes from allowing third parties to build feeds for a social networking platform. Surf is currently in beta with a sign-up list available for interested testers.
“This is just the latest example of how custom feeds on the social web can be used for all sorts of use cases — video sharing, photo sharing, discussion groups, messaging, etc. — that have been the exclusive domain of the large walled gardens,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch via email. “We’re still early days but things are moving super fast here, especially on AT Proto [the protocol that powers Bluesky.]”
To personalize the new Surf video feed, McCue said the company will soon add users’ Bluesky Following timeline (which is just another custom feed) as a source for the feed. This is also filtered to show only video posts. When this final step is completed, the feed will display videos from the people the users themselves follow.
After Bluesky on Sunday shipped its native custom video feed, which employs a new TikTok-style user interface, Surf adopted that design for its feed, as well. (Note: if you’re not seeing the TikTok-style interface on Bluesky, try restarting your mobile app a few times.)
If you’re not able to use Surf, which is still in private beta, you can use its feed directly on Bluesky. Surf federated its new custom video feed to Blueksy where it’s available as another native, custom feed option.
McCue points out that Surf itself can be used to make different kinds of video feeds, too.
For example, he also built a “BookTok” type feed, which focuses on users discussing books on video, similar to TikTok’s BookTok community. This feed can be viewed on both Surf and Bluesky.
To make this feed, McCue included all videos tagged with the hashtags #BookTok and #BookSky.
However, because those tags could exist on other apps besides Bluesky, when you use the feed on Surf itself, you’ll be able to see videos from other services like YouTube, Threads, and Mastodon, in addition to videos from Bluesky. That’s possible because Surf allows users to explore multiple social networks in its app, including those powered by protocols like ActivityPub (used by Mastodon), the AT Protocol (used by Bluesky), and RSS.
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