Before there was social media, there were internet forums. With millions of forum sites still operating, it’s worth noting that NodeBB, one of the top forum software providers, has joined the Fediverse, also known as the Open Social Web.
The current Fediverse includes apps like Mastodon, a decentralized X rival, Pixelfed, an Instagram alternative, and PeerTube, an open YouTube competitor. These “federation” services utilize a protocol called ActivityPub that enables decentralized social networking.
The ActivityPub protocol is set to be adopted by a wider range of software applications and services as users begin to move away from centralized social media apps owned by billionaires like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk. It became. This includes ActivityPub integrations made possible by WordPress (and WordPress.com), Flipboard, Medium, and even Meta itself and its Instagram Threads app. Substack competitor Ghost is also working on federation.
NodeBB’s participation also gives forum operators the option to participate in the decentralized social web.
As NodeBB co-founder Julian Lam explains in a post, the idea first came about in mid-2023 when he came up with the idea of interconnecting NodeBB forums. Initially, he says, this was going to be a centralized service. But while researching the concept further, Lam came across Mastodon and ActivityPub and realized he could decentralize the project instead.
Additionally, funding from the NLNet Foundation has enabled NodeBB to implement the ActivityPub protocol more quickly. “Their funding helped provide the financial stability to experiment with ActivityPub and participate in developer circles like SWICG and FediForum,” Lam wrote.
From now on, new forums created with NodeBB will automatically integrate with the wider open social web. However, existing customers have the option to interact with other NodeBB forums and other ActivityPub-powered software, such as Mastodon.
Unlike Discourse, another internet forum solution, the federation option comes native to NodeBB, rather than just an add-on.
“There have been a lot of changes to the core to even support the concept of accepting content from outside, so we decided to make this a core feature rather than a plugin,” Lam said in the announcement.
This new feature is available in NodeBB v4 and was already used to integrate Lam’s announcement from NodeBB to Mastodon.
Lam told TechCrunch that because NodeBB is open source software, he doesn’t have usage numbers. (And for privacy reasons, we don’t track that information.) However, you can get a rough idea of the number by viewing the download numbers for the default NodeBB theme. While not a direct indicator of NodeBB installations, the project was downloaded 4,582 times in the last week.
Additionally, 882 NodeBB installations have been checked in in the past 24 hours, Lam told TechCrunch. (However, this underestimates the actual user base because installations are not checked in regularly.)
NodeBB currently powers forum sites such as Opera, Moz, MLB: The Show, Bleeding Edge, The Daily WTF, Vivaldi, and f.lux.