ActivityPub introduced to NodeBB the concept of sharing/announcing/boosting, and we enthusiastically supported this as a method of content discovery.

While we were processing these activities (and publishing our own), we weren’t actively tracking them internally. That has changed in the latest commits (soon to be RC5); shared content from both local and remote users are tracked internally and can be viewed in the user profile.

For example, here is c/comicstrips from lemmy.world. As it is a Lemmy community, it only shares content, and does not produce any of its own.

Here is a quick recap of how sharing is handled in NodeBB:

• When remote users boost/repost content, NodeBB interprets this as a share.
• When local NodeBB admins move topics out of “uncategorized” and into a category, it is interpreted as a share and this activity is federated out to the admin’s followers.

At this time unprivileged users cannot share content.