ActivityPub

• [[go]] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
  • A standard for open social networks.
• One of the [[social web protocols]].
• One of the [[fediverse]] protocols.
• [[go]] https://activitypub.rocks

Knowledge

A good explanation of how the protocol works.

Research

1. host local servers, one tracking each service
2. connect to these servers with a locally hosted mastodon client
3. each server takes account information and mocks external accounts:
   • logs in through social media api
   • view posts, corresponding threads/comments sections
   • server publishes data form these services in real time to mastodon
   • server creates/tracks fake mastodon user from every other user
   • these users are visible with clever naming scheme and tolerated by server
   • interacting with these real servers from ur acct (must be hosted in same place) == ur account on that social media interacting with their real acct
   • likes, follows etc. also emulated – though have to check if current user is following them, has liked, has followed etc.
   • should port over images, videos, gifs etc from whatever proprietary twitter thing they use to sane default formats to display on mastodon (i guess these should be cached for some time period, then…)

Federated social media is the future.

P2P

[Assessment of the feasibility of p2p activitypub](https://octodon.social/@cwebber/99015530843597174 pull) want to avoid static ip, ideally

• run on home server, always-on computer kind of deal ie beaglebone
• NAT TOR? Zooko's triangle – choosing between human readable, decentralized and unique is impossible. PetNames proposal may be useful
• key upgrade, but all that is needed is tor .onion address support, truly

https://activitypub.rocks/: explanation of the activity pub prococol; how it works. Rotonde: cool idea for a distributed social network

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the [[ActivityStreams]] 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.

It is a [[W3C]] standard as of January 2018 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/, published by the [[W3C Social Web Working Group]].

The Fediverse SocialHub Discourse forum is where many different ActivityPub-compatible systems come together.

From the forum, How to become an ActivityPub user

From the forum, Introduction to ActivityPub

ActivityPub supports common social network activities like following, liking, announcing, adding, and blocking. For example, if you have an account on a [[Mastodon]] instance like mastodon.social, you can follow someone on a [[WriteFreely]] instance like Qua and receive updates whenever they have a new blog post.

Christopher Lemmer Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub standard:

Increasingly, much of our lives is mediated through social networks, and so network freedom in these spaces – and thus removing central control over them – is critical. One thing you may have noticed in the last decade is that many decentralized free software social networking applications have been written. Sadly, most of those applications can’t actually speak to each other – a fractured federation. I hope that with ActivityPub, we’ve improved that situation.

ActivityPub

Criticisms

My big issues with ActivityPub is that the protocol is very big and not very easy to decompose.

– indieweb chat

Unfortunately, we have come to realize that using ActivityPub is considerably harder than we expected:

• Using JSON-LD as an RDF serialization is very complicated. It requires the usage of algorithms (e.g. the Expansion Algorithm or the Framing Algorithm) that are incomprehensible and just pure madness. JSON-LD maybe was really just not intended to be an RDF serialization and trying to use it as such is painful.

• There are practically no implementations of the ActivityPub Client-to-Server protocol (C2S). This made developing and testing the client and server more time-consuming as we had to develop the protocol in lockstep on client and server. At the end we were still only compatible with our own software.

• ActivityPub is not a complete specification and many additional protocols need to be implemented (e.g. WebFinger) in specific ways in order to be compatible with existing servers.

  – openEngiadina: From ActivityPub to XMPP — inqlab

social layer that [[the federation]] uses

Diaspora

Mastodon is an open source federated micro-blogging platform.

The Mastodon documentation site https://docs.joinmastodon.org/ pull covers what a microblog and federation are:

Similar to how blogging is the act of publishing updates to a website, microblogging is the act of publishing small updates to a stream of updates on your profile. You can publish text posts and optionally attach media such as pictures, audio, video, or polls. Mastodon lets you follow friends and discover new ones.

Federation is a form of decentralization. Instead of a single central service that all people use, there are multiple services, that any number of people can use.

• homepage https://joinmastodon.org
• blog https://blog.joinmastodon.org/.
• github https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
• patreon https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

The About statement on the Patreon from the main developer Gargron is also a good description:

I'm working on Mastodon, a free, open-source social network server based on open web protocols like ActivityPub and OStatus. The social focus of the project is a viable decentralized alternative to commercial social media silos that returns the control of the content distribution channels to the people. The technical focus of the project is a good user interface, a clean REST API for 3rd party apps and robust anti-abuse tools.

The entire network is like an unlimited number of different Twitter websites, users of which can follow each other and interact regardless of which Twitter website exactly they are on. This has obvious benefits as there is no single company that has a monopoly.

Mastodon

• An [[open source]] [[social network]].
  • Most closely resembles [[twitter]].
  • It is federated; you can choose a 'local instance' to run your account, and still interact with people in other instances.
• My account is in the [[social coop]] instance: @flancian@social.coop.
  • Could provide a good identity model for other open networks, such as the [[agora]].
  • See [[flancian]] for more contact information.
• I use [[moa.party]] to cross-post [[twitter]] <-> [[mastodon]].
• I am torn on using [[mastodon]] or [[fediverse]] when I refer to, well, mostly [[mastodon]] currently for me.
• [[pull]] [[mastodon instance]] [[mastodon instances]]
• [[pull]] [[mastodon client]] [[mastodon clients]]
• [[mastodon.py]]

Mastodon is a [[social network]] and a part of [[fediverse]] running [[activity pub]].

[[2022-10-28]] I migrated to this account:. Feel free to follow. => https://merveilles.town/@bouncepaw

I previously used a [[different one]], from [[2022-03-05]].

= Links => https://github.com/blackle/mastodon-data-viewer.py

A viewer for mastodon data written in python. It creates a local server that you can use to browse the data. Designed for large (>40,000) toot archives.

=> https://gilest.org/mastodon.html | How Mastodon is different Everyone knows it.

= Mastodon Archive

Me: How easy is it to make a program that fetches my toots and threads I participate in? Maybe a program like that exists already? #programming Me: Workflow like: run the program and update the database (?) of fetched toots [[Schröder]]: @bouncepaw https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/mastodon-archive/about/ could be it?

Taking a look.

=> https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/mastodon-archive/about/

This tool allows you to make an archive of your statuses, your favourites and the media in both your statuses and your favourites. From this archive, you can generate a simple text file, or a HTML file with or without media.

Seems to be a perfect fit!

= Brutaldon Brutaldon is a brutalist front-end for Mastodon. I once used it and here's what I said back then:. The original toots are long gone.

//[[2022-04-11]] 21:21 UTC// Пишу это с BRUTALDON. А он мягкий такой, приятный. Этот туут уже пишу из w3m. Почему-то он плохо кириллицу отображает. По всей видимости, это косяк BRUTALDON. На другом сайте нормально кириллица выглядит. BRUTALDON кодирует кириллицу через HTML entities, а w3m это не понимает! Интересно. Непонятно, зачем так делать, если BRUTALDON отдаёт ответы в уникоде всё равно.

= Lack of markup [[2022-04-24]] @jonny@social.coop

mastodon should have markdown !/

Pleroma has it AFAIK. I'm so glad Mastodon has no markup other than hashtags, mentions and bare links

@jonny@social.coop

why's that?

Because lack of markup forces people to not write text that needs markup

@jonny@social.coop

i think we might see this one differently, I am more about giving people tools to do whatever they want (and then being able to turn it off if you dont like it and still hang out)

That's what other Fediverse networks are for! They offer advanced markup capabilities, and I am totally fine with it. But here on Mastodon, I like the way it is. The only feature I miss is quote boosts.

An open source social network that is federated: anyone can run a home server, and each server forms a different community which can have unique rules and features.

Resources

• Main website: https://joinmastodon.org
• Blog: https://blog.joinmastodon.org
• Github: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
• Documentation https://docs.joinmastodon.org pull
• Choose a community home server to join https://joinmastodon.org/communities
• An increasingly Less-Brief guide to Mastodon

Mastodon

#mastodon

video hosting in the [[fediverse]]

#go-link https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances