[@frankm@linux-nerds.org](https://community.nodebb.org/user/frankm%40linux-nerds.org) the reason why I'm hesitant about this is because allowing a category to follow a user bakes in the assumption that _everything the user posts is relevant_. If you're following something like the linux foundation that's a pretty safe bet for a Linux category, but what if you follow a user and they start sharing or posting about unrelated things, like what they had for breakfast, etc.? That's where things could get messy. ---- **But**, I absolutely love the idea of creating a category and making it sort of like a curated channel based around one idea. This is the kind of cool stuff I want to see!

@julian@community.nodebb.org Perhaps as a compromise, you shouldn't follow a user, but instead follow hashtags that match the topic of the category.

[@frankm@linux-nerds.org](https://community.nodebb.org/user/frankm%40linux-nerds.org) this is now done. Turns out I wasn't actually stopping a category from following a user, so that didn't need rolling back. https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13232 [@hamiller@forum.wedistribute.org](https://community.nodebb.org/user/hamiller%40forum.wedistribute.org) using a hashtag is probably also something I should allow categories to follow, although that's local-only to the instance because of how hashtags work. Either way I didn't want to restrict a valid use case

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) I have the same hesitations around having categories follow user accounts. Most users are not categories, and they do not post categorically. But some are. Satire accounts. Bot accounts. Institutional accounts, as you've called out. These are fairly safe bets, and it would be nice to allow admins the choice to roll the dice. But another paradigm to explore is *lists*, and there are a number of ways to represent those. /world could be reconfigured into /feed (stepping on the toes of the Feeds plugin), with users being able to create arbitrary feeds for themselves. Or lists could be represented as user-created pseudo-categories, given the UX of a forum category, but being personal to the user. They could be presented in /world exclusively, or appended to the bottom of the user's categories list. Forum-wide lists could be considered, creating global pseudo-categories defined by admins or moderators, with a slightly modified layout and/or visual language. This is really the transformation of a long standing medium. There's a huge possibility and design space here.

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) No problem. In my head I was thinking of a Federated account like a WordPress blog that has ActivityPub installed and confirmed working. Everyone in the Fediverse can see it, but having it followed and posted in Forum puts it there in front of the Community for a more direct conversation. I am gonna start installing and trying to figure out ActivityPub into my Drupal projects even if I am not thrilled with my previous dealings with that module.

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) Are categories supposed to follow regular users from this  screen in admin panel. Asking this because I tried putting a mastodon user profile link in the textbox but upon clicking on 'Follow' nothing happened. For threads, the request is pending(with some error, I guess) as you can see from the picture.

[@bh4-tech](https://community.nodebb.org/user/bh4-tech) can you supply the URLs you tried to follow please?

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) https://www.threads.net/@khabydistas on threads and https://mastodon.social/@dansup on mastodon

[@bh4-tech](https://community.nodebb.org/user/bh4-tech) might be not working because I did not expect urls. Can you try a handle like `dansup@mastodon.social`?

[@julian](/user/julian%40community.nodebb.org) Yeah that worked for mastodon, but not for threads. Guess that's some problem on thread's side and not nodebb. However, the remote media preview problem still remains https://community.nodebb.org/post/103782 . Guess you will need to cache remote media like misskey.

My first experience with Federation was with Calckey, (fork of Miskey.) I liked some things about it, but there were forks of forks and I never knew in the end which variant of it was best to use