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.
