Tag: activitypub

Tom describes his experiences on implementing part of the ActivityPub specification on top of his Jekyll-based static website. It is indeed quite interesting to me to see how he achieved it, mostly through “serverless” lambdas and whatnot. He notices, very well, that ActivityPub can be quite messy and is very active when compared to other technologies, such as RSS.

Similarly, most dynamic functionalities of my website could be implemented on top of a static website (as they once were). However, I’m not following that route now. Who knows if in the future I won’t switch back. An interesting… continuous… food for thought.

Today, Sebastiaan shared with me this nice post by Wouter, entitled “The Great Mastodon Influx”. I wanted to add to that that I implemented ActivityPub a few days ago, and I’ve been improving it since on my spare time. But… I am afraid. I don’t have any real followers (just myself from different instances to test). But what if I get a few followers and then get spammed with many requests? Will my tiny server in Finland handle it?

The idea of POSSEing to Mastodon doesn’t sound that bad and reduces much of the complexity associated with running a federated server. In addition, what will happen if I want to follow people? I had a very simple idea of creating a private RSS feed with incoming posts from people I would follow. The idea seems reasonably simple. But why reinvent the wheel? There’s already client apps for ActivityPub that work well. And I didn’t want to have multiple identities. Thoughts?

Since everyone is moving to Mastodon and such, I decided to re-add experimental support for ActivityPub in this website. The implementation is based on my old ActivityPub implementation, but it is massively improved… I think. There are still some things to do, but I feel like I will stick with it this time. However, if you want to help me test, follow me at @hacdias@hacdias.com 😜 You may still see my old profile from 2020 still lingering in some instances, but if you try following me, it should work.

Just like everyone else, I’ve also been following the stampede - not sure if it’s the correct word to translate debandada - of people from Twitter to Mastodon. And I’ve been considering, again, to add ActivityPub to this website. However, an interesting alternative has surged in the past days: it seems to be reasonably possible to use my own domain with an external Mastodon instance. Then, I could just syndicate from this website to my Mastodon account and use brid.gy to do its magic on bringing comments and reactions via Webmentions to my website. Just a thought.

As you might have read on my meta page, I inteded to remove support for ActivityPub:

I am considering removing the ActivityPub support from my website. Right now, my website is able to provide posts formatted as ActivityPub entries; post to my followers when I write new content; and receive comments via ActivityPub.

What bothers me is that the logic is a bit flaky and it fails quite often. Besides, I only have 2 followers and one of them is a testing account of mine. Removing it would cleanup the code and possibly not hurt anyone.

I just did it for the reasons mentions above. It’s a bit sad, but it gives me some peace of mind nevertheless. Maybe in the future, there will be a more straightforward protocol that is more massively adopted that I can implement. For now, I don’t see the use for this website.

The thing is: I’ve done this in the past. I just tried with a random Mastodon instance and the error is precisely the HTTP signature. Either I’m not signing correctly, or I’m not proving the public key correctly. But the fact that I did this in the past and it’s still not working, it’s what’s annoying me the most. Also, I’m doing this in Go and I’m basing on @jlelse’s implementation and his ActivityPub Accept is working. And my code literally looks the same. If I don’t figure it out in the next hour, I’ll leave it for another day.

So… I just tried implementing ActivityPub again… and once again, something’s wrong! Yey… When I hit the follow button on a different instance, I receive the request, process it and send a signed Accept. But it seems it’s not actually working… At least the accept part…

I’ve been in spring cleanup mode since yesterday and I started on GitHub and ended up archiving and deprecating dozens of repos that were either unmaintained or actually supposed to be deprecated.

On this website, I just removed the ActivityPub support of my website because of two reasons: it had bugs and wasn’t working properly (I think) and there were only two or three people following me, being 2 of them bots. The other one also follows me through RSS so I hope I don’t affect them very much.

Today and tomorrow I’ll also proceed to make some internal upgrades and decouple the webmentions from the static generation process of this website, inspired by Jan-Luka’s post. I need to upgrade to Caddy 2 as well as some other changes I might share later.

I think just successfully added ActivityPub support to my website. You can now follow @hacdias@hacdias.com from any ActivityPub instance and receive my latest posts! Here’s a gist of the changes I made. For now, I just support follow requests and create requests which are converted to webmentions!

I just spent a lot time trying to send signed requests to accept ActivityPub followers. It’s not working! I make the requests to Mastodon and their servers reply with 202 but the ‘Cancel follow request’ button does not change to ‘Unfollow’ and I don’t know what the problem is. In addition, the test suite has not working for over a year it seems. Ugh…