Forums

Catodon can follow and join forums, which ActivityPub represents as groups, with forum pages, forum search, forum timelines and deck columns. You can post to a forum from the post form, and forums get moderation tools of their own.

Forum search and Explore → Forums now reach Catodon’s Threadiverse Catalog, so even a new or small server can find forums it has never met. Each result is a card with the forum’s platform, language, topics, subscribers and last activity, and can be followed in one step. When the catalog is switched off, a link to the catalog site takes its place.

Forum posts can be voted on and show their score, and a forum sorts by New, Hot or Active; Catodon also recommends forums. A forum can be private, discoverable or local only, and its moderators get bans, follower removal, a moderation log and pinned posts. You can choose to be notified of new posts in a forum.

Forum posts from Lemmy, PieFed and NodeBB come through properly, link posts included, along with their votes, deletions and shares. The forums’ accounts stay in sync, and their moderation and admin information comes across.

A forum on another server, such as Lemmy, Mbin or PieFed, can now be followed through this server's proxy account, so the forum sees the proxy as its follower instead of you, while its posts still reach your timelines and notifications work as with any follow. A setting chooses which way the Follow button goes; it is not offered for this server's forums nor for forums that approve followers by hand.

Moderators and admins can add accounts to a forum themselves.

Posting a topic to several forums used to publish it several times over, as unrelated posts. It now publishes once, in the forum the most people can read, and gives each of the others a cross-post that quotes and links back — the shape Lemmy uses, so readers there and on PieFed get the text as well.

A forum on another server that nobody here follows used to look empty. Its page now has a reload button, as a remote profile does, which updates its details and fetches up to ten of its latest threads, for Lemmy, PieFed, NodeBB and other forums that list their posts publicly. Threads already known here are now filed under their forum too, and each forum can be refreshed once every five minutes.

A post in a forum's list now shows up to three lines of its text under its title, or the description of the linked page for a bare link, unless it is behind a content warning. Posts are drawn as panels like a timeline's, and in the single column layout each forum in the list shows the start of its description with its follower and post counts.

Forum directories and crawlers written for Lemmy can now list this server’s public forums, with their description, pictures and counts, through a read-only API in Lemmy’s format. Only public, federated forums listed in discovery appear. It is on by default; Control Panel → Federation → Policy turns it off, and List in forum directories leaves a single forum out.

A reply written by the author of a thread's first post now shows a small OP beside their name, in timelines, on post pages and on profiles, and clicking it opens the first post. Apps can read it as byThreadAuthor on each reply.

A forum can now state up to three languages it is for, shown on its cover and shared with other servers the way Lemmy does, so Lemmy, PieFed and forum directories show them too. Remote forums' languages are shown as well, and the Lemmy-compatible API now reports them.