What if...
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What if... you had one Fedi account on a generic headless #ActivityPub server that simply hosts and federates your data... and had C2S UIs for microblogging, long form writing, media editing and sharing, link aggregation, games, fitness tracking, and so on, that all used that same Fedi account. Technically, it's a similar concept as ATProto (but no relay and app view) and Solid Pods (but no RDF).
It seems possible... if we can improve the AP C2S API/protocol sufficiently.
@steve I've often wanted to have a C2S setup. Reading https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ made me want it more
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@steve this is a reason why blue sky made a new protocol. Tu support that first day. Fedi will take 20 years to do that
@lutindiscret @steve this is built into ActivityPub and has been since the start.
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@steve If by "sufficiently improve" you mean throwing it away and replacing with a better protocol, then yes it's possible.
I can't wait to see what you build! Good luck.
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I can't wait to see what you build! Good luck.
Maybe I am way over my head, but this seems like *exactly* what I am building right now and I'm not really building anything outside of ActivityPub C2S?
I mean... Yes, my current client assumes some specific profile for OAuth and the client will need a proxy to get some data remote servers (to bypass authorized fetch, or to resolve documents from transient activities), but doesn't seem to me that anything I am doing is outside of AP's scope?
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What if... you had one Fedi account on a generic headless #ActivityPub server that simply hosts and federates your data... and had C2S UIs for microblogging, long form writing, media editing and sharing, link aggregation, games, fitness tracking, and so on, that all used that same Fedi account. Technically, it's a similar concept as ATProto (but no relay and app view) and Solid Pods (but no RDF).
It seems possible... if we can improve the AP C2S API/protocol sufficiently.
@steve I've built the server part already, that was 5 years ago. Still waiting for people with the skills to build the UIs though...
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Maybe I am way over my head, but this seems like *exactly* what I am building right now and I'm not really building anything outside of ActivityPub C2S?
I mean... Yes, my current client assumes some specific profile for OAuth and the client will need a proxy to get some data remote servers (to bypass authorized fetch, or to resolve documents from transient activities), but doesn't seem to me that anything I am doing is outside of AP's scope?
@raphael @silverpill @steve I also think that Steve's vision is realisable with ActivityPub API, although I think adding optional features like search, server push and so on makes it easier.
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@raphael @silverpill @steve I also think that Steve's vision is realisable with ActivityPub API, although I think adding optional features like search, server push and so on makes it easier.
Silverpill does not agree with us. I am wishing Silverpill well in their plan to rebuild with a completely different ground-up API. Silverpill is skilled and smart and very familiar with ActivityPub in great detail, so I'm sure they will come up with some interesting API architecture.
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Silverpill does not agree with us. I am wishing Silverpill well in their plan to rebuild with a completely different ground-up API. Silverpill is skilled and smart and very familiar with ActivityPub in great detail, so I'm sure they will come up with some interesting API architecture.
@raphael @silverpill @steve I don't intend to stop working on the ActivityPub API.
There are a lot of us collaborating through the SocialCG ActivityPub API Task Force, and I expect that collaboration to continue:
GitHub - swicg/activitypub-api: ActivityPub API Task Force repository.
ActivityPub API Task Force repository. Contribute to swicg/activitypub-api development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
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@steve I've built the server part already, that was 5 years ago. Still waiting for people with the skills to build the UIs though...
@mariusor @steve Does your server work with https://checkin.swf.pub/ ? Or https://github.com/evanp/ap ?
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@mariusor @steve Does your server work with https://checkin.swf.pub/ ? Or https://github.com/evanp/ap ?
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@mariusor @steve Does your server work with https://checkin.swf.pub/ ? Or https://github.com/evanp/ap ?
@evan @mariusor @steve oh neat!
Add Arrive outbox handler for check-in activities by pfefferle 路 Pull Request #2977 路 Automattic/wordpress-activitypub
ActivityPub for WordPress. Contribute to Automattic/wordpress-activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
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@steve I've built the server part already, that was 5 years ago. Still waiting for people with the skills to build the UIs though...
@mariusor
I was thinking about trying to build a lightweight wrapper around c2s that mimics the Mastodon/pixelfed API, and then just bootstrap every existing mastodon/pixelfed client but that feels like more work than it'd be worth -
@mariusor
I was thinking about trying to build a lightweight wrapper around c2s that mimics the Mastodon/pixelfed API, and then just bootstrap every existing mastodon/pixelfed client but that feels like more work than it'd be worth@tom I doubt you can reproduce the timelines and the tag following with anything lightweight.
It probably needs a lot of caching and reprocessing of collections... -
@tom I doubt you can reproduce the timelines and the tag following with anything lightweight.
It probably needs a lot of caching and reprocessing of collections...@mariusor Yeah that's where I was hung up with my mental model of it and why I haven't actually tried anything yet
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@raphael @silverpill @steve I don't intend to stop working on the ActivityPub API.
There are a lot of us collaborating through the SocialCG ActivityPub API Task Force, and I expect that collaboration to continue:
GitHub - swicg/activitypub-api: ActivityPub API Task Force repository.
ActivityPub API Task Force repository. Contribute to swicg/activitypub-api development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
@evan @raphael @steve I think a generic ActivityPub server can't be built without major changes to ActivityPub. For example, it might be necessary to make all side-effects of activities explicit.
And there is a bigger problem. A generic server without FEP-ef61 is like ATProto PDS or Nostr relay but all data is tied to a single server. This means that it is obsolete before the work has even begun.
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@evan @mariusor @steve oh neat!
Add Arrive outbox handler for check-in activities by pfefferle 路 Pull Request #2977 路 Automattic/wordpress-activitypub
ActivityPub for WordPress. Contribute to Automattic/wordpress-activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
@pfefferle @mariusor @steve WHAT
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@pfefferle @mariusor @steve that's awesome!
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What if... you had one Fedi account on a generic headless #ActivityPub server that simply hosts and federates your data... and had C2S UIs for microblogging, long form writing, media editing and sharing, link aggregation, games, fitness tracking, and so on, that all used that same Fedi account. Technically, it's a similar concept as ATProto (but no relay and app view) and Solid Pods (but no RDF).
It seems possible... if we can improve the AP C2S API/protocol sufficiently.
I love this vision. One hurdle I see is the lack of content types + the ability to represent them in HTML.
Bandwagon is my best use case: Albums and Tracks aren鈥檛 a standard data type. I could push those into my own AP server, but other servers wouldn鈥檛 know how to represent them correctly.
For this to work, we need a restricted subset of HTML for generating previews of unknown content.
This feature exists in oEmbed (optional) but is poorly supported on the Fediverse.
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@steve I've built the server part already, that was 5 years ago. Still waiting for people with the skills to build the UIs though...
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@evan @raphael @steve I think a generic ActivityPub server can't be built without major changes to ActivityPub. For example, it might be necessary to make all side-effects of activities explicit.
And there is a bigger problem. A generic server without FEP-ef61 is like ATProto PDS or Nostr relay but all data is tied to a single server. This means that it is obsolete before the work has even begun.
@silverpill @evan @raphael Several generic AP server implementations have been built, so I don't know what you mean by the side-effect comment. Note that my mental model of a generic server doesn't implement any domain-specific behaviors in the server, but only side-effects specified by AP (and extended generic C2S support). There are also simpler ways to design servers so that content isn't tied to a specific server (with different tradeoffs than FEP-ef61). That's a long discussion...
