Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Questions for people who know #ActivityPub better than I do:
1. How is #federation supposed to interact with HTTP #redirects? For example, if I import a post to a new account, and put a 301 redirect on the old location, should another AP instance interact with the post at its new location from then on?
2. Does anything actually implement it?
Wondering if it would be possible to do that with a few posts on a single-user instance I'm planning to move to a new domain in the near future.
Part of the promise of #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse is that you can interact not just with different servers, but different kinds of servers. I’ve been testing how well different platforms interact, reported some bugs, and even fixed a couple of them.
Not surprisingly, I’ve found that the bigger projects have good #interoperability with each other, smaller projects have good interoperability with Mastodon, and smaller projects are more likely to have bugs in interoperability with each other. Sometimes you can view someone’s posts or profiles on another platform, but following them doesn’t work, and replies don’t make it back. Or only some kinds of posts are visible.
Does anyone have a #compatibility matrix I can contribute to, or should I just post my notes somewhere? @fediversenews
Hot take: No #ActivityPub software should have to write implementation-specific code to do basic federation with another program. The fact that a program, even a work in progress, can follow Mastodon but not Pixelfed means that something is broken in either the spec or the ecosystem.
I don’t mean one app implementing videos and the other not, or one app implementing edits and the other not. I mean both servers implement some feature, and each can federate with itself, but not with each other.
For example, the current alpha version of GoToSocial can follow Mastodon, but not Pixelfed. That shouldn’t be *possible*. They both speak ActivityPub, so no matter what extra stuff Mastodon or Pixelfed does with following, they should have the base functionality in common — and whether GTS handles the extras or not, that core functionality should work with both or work with neither.
Edited the OP to make it clearer that I’m talking about the server-to-server federation over ActivityPub, not the user-interface-to-server communication over whatever API the server uses.
Discovered an advantage to generating the #LinkPreview on the receiving server: You'll still get previews on posts from other #ActivityPub software that doesn't provide its own.
For example, a post from #GoToSocial in its current alpha version seen on #Mastodon.
I've been slowly redoing parts of my personal website over the last year or so, continually pulled between two extremes.
1. I want to make everything federate with everything else so it's as interoperable as possible, from #ActivityPub to #IndieWeb!
2. I want something that doesn't add any attack surface on top of the webserver, that loads and renders super-fast, and that can be zipped up and tossed on an S3-compatible bucket in the event of financial trouble or untimely demise.
Fixed *part* of my blog’s ActivityPub setup and now you can find @kelson and its recent posts, but it’s not turning up specific posts in search yet.
I did successfully boost a blog post, judging by the 10 minutes of hits from mastodon/pleroma/etc servers!
I’m using this #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ and I’m working out conflicts with Let’s Encrypt and subfolders and something else, possibly caching
To deal with the combination of #LetsEncrypt and using #WordPress in a #subdirectory, I’m using this in my .htaccess at the top level of the site:
RewriteRule ^.well-known/(host-meta|webfinger|nodeinfo|x-nodeinfo) /journal/.well-known/$1 [L]
This is to ensure that *only* the webfinger and nodeinfo endpoints are forwarded to the blog where the #ActivityPub plugin picks them up, and Let’s Encrypt will find .acme-challenge and be able to renew my TLS cert when the time comes.
I’m not sure yet why searching for an individual post doesn’t work. I’m going to get back to $dayJob for the afternoon & take another look at that part later.
Is there a concept of an #ActivityPub hub?
I’m thinking long-term it would be cool to have my own federated microblog, full blog, and photo gallery, using the most appropriate software for each, but present them as accounts on a single hostname instead of having to do a separate subdomain for each.