Before there was social media, there were online forums. Millions of forum sites continue to work, which is why it’s notable that a leading forum software provider, NodeBB, is now joining fedivers, also known as the open social network.
Fedivers today includes apps like X’s decentralized 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 networks.
As users began to move 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 apps and software services. This includes ActivityPub integrations powered by WordPress (and WordPress.com), Flipboard, Medium, and even Meta itself with its Instagram Threads app. Substack competitor Ghost is also working to federate.
With the NodeBB merger, forum operators will now also have the option to join the decentralized social network.
As NodeBB co-founder Julian Lam explains in a post, the idea was first born in mid-2023 when he had the idea to connect the NodeBB forums to each other. Initially, this would be a centralized service, he says. But as he researched the concept further, Lam came across Mastodon and ActivityPub and realized the project could be decentralized instead.
In addition, funding from the NLNet Foundation allowed NodeBB to implement the ActivityPub protocol faster. “Their funding was important in providing the financial stability to experiment with ActivityPub and participate in developer circles such as SWICG, FediForum and more,” Lam wrote.
Going forward, every new forum created with NodeBB will automatically join the most open social network. However, existing customers will have the ability to interact with other NodeBB forums and any other software powered by ActivityPub, such as Mastodon.
Unlike another web forum solution, Discourse, the option to federate will be native to NodeBB, not just an add-on.
“We chose to make this a core feature instead of a plugin, as there were many changes made to the core to also support the concept of accepting content from outside,” Lam noted in his announcement.
The new feature is available in v4 of NodeBB and is already used to federate Lam notification from NodeBB to Mastodon.
Lam tells TechCrunch that because NodeBB is open source software, they don’t have numbers in use. (Plus, they try not to track that information for privacy reasons.) However, you can get a rough idea by looking at the number of downloads for the default NodeBB theme. Although not a direct translation of the number of NodeBB installs, the project was downloaded 4,582 times last week.
Additionally, 882 NodeBB installations were checked within the last 24 hours, Lam told TechCrunch. (However, this also underestimates the true user base since installs are not checked regularly.)
NodeBB currently powers forum sites like Opera, Moz, MLB: The Show, Bleeding Edge, The Daily WTF, Vivaldi, f.lux and others.
