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Understanding ActivityPub and Federation (mastodon.social)

submitted 1 year ago by JustusWingert@mastodon.social to c/programming

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Understanding ActivityPub and Federation

I have tried to understand how Federation works but I'm getting a feeling that there's some rather large gaps here. My first attempt was to find an API implementation in python, 3 wasted hours of my life later and I'm making requests.request() calls like it's 2007. And I still can't access the content as presented on the webinterfaces. There doesn't seem to be a way to access eg the communities tab via activitypub? Any Help?

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[–] JustusWingert@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You actually described my expectation in that last paragraph. I fully expected to have to invent a curated list of endpoints. What I instead found was that even given an endpoint (like beehaw.org) there is no way to discover what is on that instance. Which is a big issue. I've discussed this a bit (albeit extremely slowly) with the folks in the activitypub irc, and pretty much got it confirmed. If you want to develop a service that is intent on delivering any form of public content at all, supporting activitypub, then you have no protocol based way of communicating this content to anyone. So going by that the lemmy implementation is actually "correct", in as much as the protocol simply fails to provide guidance for this critical step.

[–] alexland 1 points 1 year ago

That's not really the protocol's job though. We use HTTP as the protocol for APIs on the web, but HTTP does not require any specific endpoints -- that's up to the application itself. Ultimately I think this is a pain point caused by the relative immaturity of the ActivityPub ecosystem, and over time I suspect the way that services define their APIs will become more uniform (likely with the help of libraries/interfaces that define common functionality or help bridge the gap between different implementations). In the meantime it's pretty rough going though, and we'll see if some big players joining the space (Meta is rumored to be working on a Twitter competitor using ActivityPub) help define de-facto standards to make it easier.