Sorry for the late reply, but yeah I tried both ways.

Yeah, but it was empty for me. Might require login or something. Or maybe there are just no related communities?

Eh, either way - not a big deal lol

Ok, that’s good news! Also, I checked the activitypub.space, and see they have a related communities section, but it wasn’t clickable for me (maybe it just requires login, or some other simple issue inm missing) - regardless that is a great feature and might be a good way to pull content into the forum without muddying the content within my primary categories. :)

Thank you.

1. I’ll definitely check out Anubis and your configuration to see if it will work for my scenario.
2. Ok, good to know - if it’s simply a bug then that that’s fine, mostly I wanted to make sure it wasn’t an indicator that something deeper was broken or getting blocked in the communication.
3. Sorry, I used the term instance when I meant community. But it sounds like the federation is more so to bring traffic into the forum, rather then out. Did I understand that correctly? If that is the case, then I may not opt to use it - as I was originally hoping for a way to push forum content into communities. I’ll explore this further I guess - because I’m unfamiliar with relays and fedibuzz.

Overall, I appreciate the detailed response :)

[Edit, for archival purposes]: I looked into Anubis, and it looks like a great option, but I have my nodeBB forum installed via Cloudron, and just a quick rudimentary search reveals that it may be difficult to set up alongside Cloudron. This post: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/13957/deploying-anubis-ai-crawler-filtering-on-a-cloudron-server/7 shows an example of using a second vps to accomplish it, but …well it requires a second vps. If anyone comes up with a solution in the future and stumbles across this post, I’d love to hear how you worked it out.

Can mbin browse Lemmy/piefed? I would love to only use one app/login if possible. If one application can correctly view/post to each service - then it would seem logical to just use the one. I might switch to mbin If it can browse Lemmy content.

I know it’s just a meme, and I don’t want to be “that guy” but van life isn’t actually as affordable as it’s often made out to seem. Lots of hidden costs to take into account like where you can park and etc.