One (small) issue is that it assumes there *is* a client outside of the server. Most server apps have both a web UI and an API, and it's even possible to build an ActivityPub server with no client API at all (microblog.pub was like that, IIRC). I think the ActivityPub C2S API was intended for servers that worked just like you're describing, but IDK if anyone ever really implemented it properly.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
48 points (98.0% liked)
Fediverse
28380 readers
778 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Hmmm. Speaking of Fediverse interoperability, platforms other than yours (Pandacap) typically arrange things so that https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ was the domain, and something like https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/users/lizard-socks was the user, but Pandacap wants to use https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ for both. Combined with the fact that it doesn't seem to support /.well-known/nodeinfo means that no other platform knows what software it's running.
When your actor sends something out, it uses the id https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/, but when something tries to look that up, it returns a "Person" with a subtly different id of https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/ (no trailing slash). So there's the potential to create the following:
https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/sends something out.- Instance hasn't heard of that, so looks it up, and creates a new user in its database, with the returned ID (
https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/) https://pandacap.azurewebsites.net/sends else something out. Instance looks in it's DB, finds nothing, so looks it up and tries to create it again. The best case is that it meets a DB uniqueness constraint, because the ID it gets back from that lookup does actually exist (so it can use that, but it was a long way around to find it). The worst case - when there's no DB uniqueness constraint -is that a 'new' user is created every time.- Repeat step 3 for every new thing you send.
If every new platform treats the Fediverse as a wheel that needs to be re-invented, then the whole project is doomed.
I've been working with some smart people on something to hopefully become a "federated account" that can be used with any service, and is 100% compatible with OIDC, so its easy for systems to implement as the authentication vehicle: https://fedid.me/
Just presented it at IIW and interest is building thus far, so my hopes are high 😉
That sounds really interesting! We’re building an OIDC server for indies with Weird – please feel free to come by and chat with us: https://blog.muni.town/muni-town/
For clarity, it's not Lemmy that uses 'Article'. I can't remember what does, friendica maybe?
Lemmy uses 'Page' for posts, and 'Note' for comments.
Mastodon uses 'Note' for both, with 'inReplyTo' used to distinguish whether Lemmy would call it a 'Page'. It uses 'Question' for polls.
Pixelfed also uses 'Note', with an 'Image' type attachment (I thinks Loops is similar, just with a 'Video' type attachment).
PeerTube uses 'Video'.
Funkwhale uses 'Album' and 'Playlist'
CastoPod uses 'PodcastEpisode'
There's no one universal ActivityPub server because the Fediverse is based on a broken promise: i.e. that you should be able to use whatever service, to interact with whatever other one. You very often can't, because ActivityPub hasn't been implemented by each platform as some universal thing, it's been co-opted by each to serve it's own purposes. Lemmy best federates with other Lemmy instances, following Lemmy's way of doing stuff, but a good chuck of the Fediverse follows a different model, and is receiving their activity and quietly discarding it because it doesn't know what to do with it. If all the Lemmy instances suddenly chose to use a different protocol than ActivityPub, most people wouldn't notice the difference.
There have been some platforms that combined form factors like Friendica and mbin
Mbin is so cool, it's what I'm using.
I think piefed.social/pyfedi (which is slowly implementing support for all such objects) should get a mention here as well
The only problem that I see with this is that images and especially videos take up vastly more space than plain text.
And does ActivityPub include client APIs? I haven't looked at it, but my completely unfounded impression has been that it only handled server to server communication.
That is a fair point, and I don't have the answer. Maybe use technics that @peertube@framapiaf.org uses like torrenting (or another way of decentralized storage), I guess you could use a cdn/object bucket?
Imho, ActivityPub is a bad protocol that tries to accomplish everything, and ends up being bad at all of it. The spec is also ambiguous in a lot of areas. And major implementations don’t always follow the spec. All in all, it’s a miracle the fediverse even works as well as it does.
Instead of being "bad," I consider ActivityPub as not being mature yet.
Other internet protocol like HTTP or email are also really basic on its early inception, but it later adding so many features and capabilities to be more modern and flexible.
Give it enough time, and ActivityPub will be mature enough for varied use cases.
I didn’t say basic. I said bad. HTTP 1 is a good protocol. ActivityPub is not. Read both the specs if you don’t believe me. I have.
There’s not a single point in HTTP 1 that I thought, “what the fuck does that mean?” There are several in ActivityPub. ActivityPub also has several areas that are ambiguous. Ambiguity is bad in a specification.
ActivityPub tries to support everything, and has no defined behavior for when a client doesn’t support whatever thing it just received.
It also uses JSON-LD, which isn’t necessarily bad, but defeats the purpose of JSON by making it too complicated to easily write by hand.
This is not easy to write, read, or parse, or build:
{
"@context": {
"name": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name",
"homepage": {
"@id": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/workplaceHomepage",
"@type": "@id"
},
"Person": "http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person"
},
"@id": "https://me.example.com/",
"@type": "Person",
"name": "John Smith",
"homepage": "https://www.example.com/"
}
I haven't developed anything with #ActivityPub, but have read a little bit of the spec. I would love to hear the take from developers making use of it.
(Sorry for the mention in any case)
@silverpill@mitra.social
@hongminhee@fosstodon.org
@dansup@mastodon.social
@thisismissem@hachyderm.io
Agree with the article, same idea. Despite the opinions each one of us may have regardless #nostr and #bluesky, they have cool ideas we could borrow.
While I think fragmentation can grow into being a problem, trying to standardize things too much can be problematic too, as the developers would be bloating the software for features that the community may use very little, as well as, by consequence of the bloating, the devs being either limited to a design that needs to take into account the quirks of all object formats, or to make some frankenstein monster design to include those different formats.
A more reliable path, I think, is what Kbin (RIP) and its successor Mbin do, to have a section for articles and one for notes. While it's still more load on the developers and the servers, at least it shouldn't be as much as having to make sense of multiple formats together, since the two sections don't directly interfere with each other. This, on a final point, is, to my understanding, and with their respective proportions, what happens with the Linux family of operating systems, where it's also pretty fragmented, but every once in a while a way to put two different environments together appear, like Wine and Xfce translating Windows and QT5 programs, or AppImage and Flatpak trying to be as universal as possible by depending on as little default dependencies from the host system as possible.
This is what I also think, would make the #fediverse much more viable this way.