Federation: Why does my content look different on other platforms?

Federating content to other platforms comes with its own share of surprises. Sometimes your content is faithfully shared and rendered the way you mean it to be, and sometimes it is remixed and changed in ways you didn't expect.

It's up to the receiving end as to how to best represent your content, but NodeBB will always try its best to send a version of your content out that looks like what is posted on the forum itself.

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

Threaded vs. Linear style

NodeBB displays its content in a linear style. That is, everything is shown in a straight line, even though some posts may be in direct response to another post further up the line. This presentation style has been common among forums since the very beginning, but other software may display comments differently.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each style of presentation.

For example...

Lemmy and Piefed are two other forum-like softwares that display in a threaded style similar to Reddit. You might like that style better than NodeBB! That's okay, we don't judge :smiley:

Mastodon is a microblog ("X/Twitter"-like), which tends to display only one "branch" of a comment tree at a time.

Short form vs. Long form

NodeBB can communicate with many different softwares with different content length preferences. "Microblog"-style sites tend to favour smaller, shorter pieces of content, while blogs skew towards longer-form content. NodeBB is able to display both, but excels at displaying medium-to-long-form content.

However, some microblogs don't tend to display long-form content very well. In order to improve the presentation of content from NodeBB to those sites, NodeBB will send a automatically-generated "summary" that is an excerpt of your content, for optional display.

We calculate this by taking the first 500 characters of your post, and breaking them down into sentences. We then try to include as many sentences as we can without exceeding 500 characters, and compile them as your excerpt.

I think 500 characters is too short/long.

The site administrator can update this value to be higher or lower. This can be configure in ACP > Federation > Content.

I don't like where you chose to end my excerpt!

No problem, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution! We also support the use of a magic keyword that you can use to tell NodeBB where to end your excerpt.

Simply put the characters [...] where you want the excerpt to end. Using this method, you can also exceed the configurable limit, which is intentional. This is a power-user feature.