I suppose you're right in a way. The context owner is not supposed to be set by someone other than the context owner. It's a fallback mechanism intended for better compatibility with Mastodon. When a group is addressed and it is one of the local NodeBB categories, it will assume control If it is another group that it knows about but isn't same origin to the author, then no category is assumed.

> One weakness I have noticed in NodeBB's current federation is that posts which are in reply to a topic (e.g. a Lemmy comment) show up as individual threads until (or if) the root post of that topic shows up in the local NodeBB. No, Lemmy does not implement either strategy, they rely on 1b12 only. If NodeBB is receiving parts of a topic that don't resolve up to the root-level post that might be something we can fix. I'll try to take a look at it.

[email protected] let me know if I got any of the details wrong. Much thanks to your team for the assist in debugging!