Learning how nodeBB works and have a working instance up.

@incentive@mastodon.circlewithadot.net hmmm, can you send me your instance for me to take a look at?

Do you have a proper url set in config.json?

Thank you!

@julian Currently testing at https://board.circlewithadot.net

I have a similar error when trying to subscribe to one of your groups from ActivitySpace.pub, shown in the image.

The logs stay silent if I observe them while I remove/add these, but I'd assume that *something* should show?

config.json is set properly, seeing "info: Canonical URL: https://board.circlewithadot.net" in logs and if I cat out the current config.json from the container I get ""url": "https://board.circlewithadot.net""

@julian Masto formatting - to be clear https, not http, is in the logs and config.json for canonical URL.

@julian One more bit of the puzzle. If I try to follow my account from masto, it's stuck in pending.

I'm wondering if it's an issue with federation via my reverse proxy for nodebb now (an issue I've had with masto when I first learned it) and not nodeBB actually. I would think logs would hint at this though.

Going to keep diving.

@incentive@mastodon.circlewithadot.net your forum does seem to be responding ok, but perhaps ActivityPub requests aren't making it in due to proxy or security settings (as you surmised)

If you can't follow anyone and nobody can follow you that does seem to be the case.

I'm assuming if you paste an URL into the search it works ok to pull in content?

@julian I think I resolved the issue partially. When I initially setup nodebb, the canonical url was set to http instead of https, I didn't change that until *after* my initial attempts to federate with my own Mastodon, ActivityPub.space and lemmy communities. http format was still in my Mastodon cache, so there was a mismatch when subsequent attempts were made.

Clearing the cache for my board from mastodon allowed me to follow my nodebb account from my Mastodon account successfully.

@julian However the issue persists for ActivityPub.space and both Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world. I'm going to assume it's because http is still in the cache from the initial attempts.

@incentive@mastodon.circlewithadot.net that's great to hear!

I am not sure if that will fix issues with your category follows though. Hopefully!

Let meet know

@incentive@board.circlewithadot.net if you run into any additional trouble.

@julian@activitypub.space Unfortunately only some functionality seems to exist, but I'm still having issues subscribing to group actors in categories- both Lemmy and nodeBB.

Using technical-discussion@activitypub.space as an example, I'm to add https://activitypub.space/category/5 as shown in my screenshot?

And if it is a Lemmy community, I would add https://lemmy.ml/c/fediverse (for example)?

I'm writing this message to you just fine from my NodeBB instance however, and I see it's going over to activitypub.space just fine. [edit: not seeing this comment over there though from this account] Stumped. <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://board.circlewithadot.net/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f643.png?v=fa605f4c603" title="" />

Screenshot From 2026-02-08 21-44-20.png

@julian @incentive@board.circlewithadot.net Unfortunately I don't think my reply to you from my instance made it to your board (it did make it to the mastodon version of the thread though). Group actor issues still.

https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/78

Depends what you want to do with categories.

If you want to just start receiving content from that category, have your user start watching it (or tracking it). Then it'll show up in /world.

The category sync tooling is mainly for if you want every topic from a sync'd category to be cross-posted to your own category.

@julian I think it's mostly figured out now. I'm starting to see a lot content in /world and relays are connected. Still having some issues following group actors, but I'm going to give it a day or so and see how things improve as the connected instanced number increases.

Another quirk is migrating this conversation to the nodebb category on my board, and suddenly it is inaccessible to me from there. But I'm going to ignore that issue unless I see it happen again.

@julian@activitypub.space Got everything figured out! There were some permissions issues that needed sorted out on the host machine, and I rebuilt nodebb to ensure everything wrote to the container space with proper permissions and successfully. Looks like federation is working just fine on my board now!