Federation: Community Kickstart Guide

julian

The hardest part of building a community is getting your users. If you don't have users, you don't have content, and if you don't have content, users won't join your forum. This chicken-and-egg game leads to many communities closing down due to lack of usage. Federation allows you to bypass this step by allowing you to "adopt" the fediverse as a source of content, so you don't have to worry about retaining users, but just creating content.

NodeBB ships with a couple of powerful features that allow you to jump-start any new forum with live conversation and discussion with only a few clicks. This guide introduces you to these tools and teaches you how to use them.

This article is part of the NodeBB Answers category, where you can learn more about setting up, maintaining, and using your NodeBB forum.

Relays & Hashtags

Relays are one of the easiest way to get content to stream into your instance. Not only do they provide content to you, setting up a relay subscription also allows you to send a copy of any local content for syndication to other relay subscribers.

N.B. We recommend setting up a subscription to the FediBuzz Relay, see below.

A good directory of relays can be found at the aptly-named Relay List. Note that different relays have different strengths depending on the type of content you'd like to receive. Some are specific to certain languages, others specific to topic.

You can administer your relays by navigating to ACP > Federation > Relays.

Each relay has a specific address that you should subscribe to. When looking into a relay, you'll want to add the "Pleroma"-style relay address — it usually ends with /actor.

Screenshot of the "Add New Relay" modal in the admin control panel

FediBuzz

A specific type of relay called the #FediBuzz Relay allows you to set up a relay specific to a instance or a hashtag. This allows you to drill down to specific interest groups and drastically increase the signal-to-noise ratio of incoming content.

For example, if you are starting a forum about guitars, it would make a lot of sense for you to receive any and all topics that are tagged #guitar.

In that case, a selection of FediBuzz relays to use could be:

https://relay.fedi.buzz/tag/guitar
https://relay.fedi.buzz/tag/acousticguitar
https://relay.fedi.buzz/tag/electricguitar
https://relay.fedi.buzz/tag/music

You can add these relays using the same interface as above.

Note that different hashtags have different levels of noise depending on how focused your forum intends to be. For example, the music hashtag could contain a lot of topics about all types of music, not being limited to guitar music. In that case, that conversation might be related, but not a good fit for a guitar-focused forum.

Auto-categorization Rules

Getting content into your instance is only one step in kickstarting your community. By default, all remote content that is received is visible in the /world page. Getting this content imported into your forum is the other half of the equation, allowing you to bring this discussion into the local categories themselves.

While you could manually find the topics and move them into your local categories, it is a lot easier (and faster!) to automate this by setting up an "auto-categorization rule" in the admin panel. You can find this page in ACP > Federation > Categorization.

A screenshot of the "Add New Rule" dialog, allowing users to automatically categorize incoming content from outside their forum

In this dialog you can instruct NodeBB to automatically categorize content into a specific category based on author or hashtag.

Try it today!

By combining relays, hashtags, and auto-categorization rules, it is possible to jump-start discussion on your forum around a specific topic, even though you may not have the local users to support it. At the end of the day, discussion can live on your forum or it can live on other instances, on the fediverse. Federation merely allows you to join that discussion and contribute your own.