ActivityPub Integration

Overview

Discussion and design of ActivityPub / Mastodon with ENiGMA½.

GitHub Issues

• ActivityPub / Mastodon #459

Desired Integrations

• Act as both a server and a client
  • On behalf of users
  • As the BBS itself (bot)
• Feed views
  • Local
  • Federated
  • Following
• Inbox
  • Direct replies also land in user's inbox
  • User can again reply, or directly post to ActivityPub addresses
  • Similar to EchoMail
• Message Areas
  • Ability to map a message area to a ActivityPub 'group'
  • Read and reply in message base
  • Similar to EchoMail
  • Bridged message areas, such as FTN (non-Mastodon node) <-> Local (Mastodon) <-> Fediverse

Misc

• Add additional info/debug/warn/error logging to web.js to help track down issues and to (long term) help identify abuse by logging IP, maybe correlation id, etc etc.
• Looks like Mastodon is adding some Group functionality that might make my suggested workaround for message areas unnecessary (depends on timing, I see anything about when it will be released though it does look like it is funded work): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19059

Questions

• Should we create a more generalized ActivityPub support/module/classes that Mastodon then extends?
• Is the web part of this big enough that we should look into using something like express.js and a module like activitypub-express instead of rolling our own implementation

References

• ActivityPub
• https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/

Implementations

• https://github.com/jakelazaroff/dumbo
• https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html
• https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon
• https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/activitypub-express / https://github.com/immers-space/activitypub-express

Approach for web components

• Build our own (maybe using https://github.com/jakelazaroff/dumbo as a guide)
  • Advantages

    No rework required, extending what we already have

    Can build it up a little at a time

  • Disadvantages

    We are totally on the hook for interoperability

    Maybe more work overall when some of it has already been done for us

• Use existing activitypub-express module - https://github.com/immers-space/activitypub-express
  • Advantages

    Very complete

    Popular

    Interchangeable storage (that we would have to swap out)

    Active (last update Nov 11)

  • Disadvantages

    The completeness might lead to additional time to understand the full codebase

    Although storage is interchangeable, it is centered around ActivityPub, decent amount of work there to interface