Whether ActivityPub or ATProto or webmention, the underlying technical protocol a community uses to interact online is a poor way to judge who they are and whether you might like them.

The big promise of federated social tools is neither Mastodon (or Calckey or any of the other things I’ve seen yet) nor the single-server Bluesky beta—it’s new things built in new ways that use protocols like AT and ActivityPub to interact with the big world.

The code above is somewhat simplified and missing some checks that I would advise implementing in a serious production application. For example:The request contains a Date header. Compare it with current date and time within a reasonable time window to prevent replay attacks.It is advisable that requests with payloads in the body also send a Digest header, and that header be signed along in the signature. If it’s present, it should be checked as another special case within the comparison string: Instead of taking the digest value from the received header, recompute it from the received body.While this proves the request comes from an actor, what if the payload contains an attribution to someone else? In reality you’d want to check that both are the same, otherwise one actor could forge messages from other people.

We need to read the Signature header, split it into its parts (keyId, headers and signature), fetch the public key linked from keyId, create a comparison string from the plaintext headers we got in the same order as was given in the signature header, and then verify that string using the public key and the original signature.

IndieWeb citizen IndieAuth support (OAuth2 extension) Microformats everywhere Micropub support Sends and processes Webmentions RSS/Atom/JSON feed

Sure, this means that the conversations take place on those platforms, but the source of my content – my words – are still on my site, which I control.

While that discourse is very important, the complexity it would add to the site to manage it, just isn’t worth it in my eyes.

we need to consider how the architecture might make the UX suck.

Tom MacWright, a software developer in Brooklyn, has firsthand experience with the pitfalls of ActivityPub. As an experiment, he tried to turn his photo blog into an actor that could be followed by users via their Mastodon accounts. It worked in the end—and you can search for @photos@macwright.com from your Mastodon instance to follow his photography—but it wasn't easy.

"Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.

Why on earth don’t we have an enormous spam problem?” and my answer to that is: you know, I just don’t know. I guess implementing AP has been too much effort for spammers up until now?

First, to experiment personally with AP itself, and if possible with the less known Activities that AP could support, e.g. travel and check-ins. This as an extension of my personal site in areas that WordPress, OPML and RSS currently can’t provide to me. This increases my own agency, by adding affordances to my site. This in time may mean I won’t be hosting or self-hosting my personal Mastodon instance. (See my current fediverse activities)

Inbox is an application built for a diploma thesis to showcase work with Linked Data Notifications, Activity Streams and ActivityPub, using Solid pod as data provider.

o understand what Activity Streams is, think of it as an abstract syntax to represent basically anything that can be an action on social media. The Activity Streams Vocabulary specification defines, amongst other things, three types of objects: Actors: Application, Group, Organization, Person, Service. Activity types: Accept, Add, Announce, Arrive, Block, Create, Delete, Dislike, Flag, Follow, Ignore, Invite, Join, Leave, Like, Listen, Move, Offer, Question, Read, Reject, Remove, TentativeAccept, TentativeReject, Travel, Undo, Update, View. Objects: Article, Audio, Document, Event, Image, Note, Page, Place, Profile, Relationship, Tombstone, Video. To build a valid Activity Streams activity, you pick one of each category and add some metadata to it. You describe that something did something to or with something, and you explain those things in more detail.

Towards a  federated metaverse

Your Hub’s CMS: a Thinking Management System for writersEach Hub’s content management system (CMS) is actually a “Thinking Management System”: a thinking tool based on a Personal Knowledge Graph (PKG) which is custom-designed to support thinking and writing.

SkoHub supports a novel approach for finding content on the web. The general idea is to extend the scope of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) to also act as communication hubs for publishers and information seekers. In effect, SkoHub allows to follow specific subjects in order to be notified when new content about that subject is published.