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   Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 02:34:55 JST Evan Prodromou

   OK, I've got a question for #ActivityPub developers. I'm working on an extended example for the O'Reilly Media book I'm writing, focusing on the federation protocol. I'm going to cover using HTTP Signature, handling and sending the important set of Activity types defined in the AP spec (Follow, Create, Add, ...).

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 02:36:25 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     My problem is that creating a real social network application requires a lot more than just the federation part. Registration, signup, login, settings, email verification -- it's a lot of code. And I'm writing a book specifically about the protocols and APIs, not about how to make a social network app.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 02:38:22 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     So, instead of making a full-fledged social network account server, I'm thinking of having the actors be bots. They can be useful bots, so it's not a completely toy project, but they wouldn't need to be as carefully managed as accounts for real people.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 02:41:42 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     My question for you, software developer, is: if you were reading this book, would you understand what was going on here -- as long as it's carefully explained in the text? Would you be able to make the leap of mapping the actors to real users of your CMS, photo sharing app, or gaming network?

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     David Cornu (dc@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 02:57:47 JST David Cornu

     in reply to

     @evan definitely

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     kik (kik@techhub.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 04:28:06 JST kik

     in reply to

     @evan I'm currently about to implement HTTP Signature, and it's the first time since I started working on ActivityPub features that I feel lost, mainly due to the fact that it looks like people are implementing a patched older version of the standard rather than the most recent one, or I'm really confused (I asked about it on Mastodon's GitHub discussions since I'm following their implementation, but never got an answer: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/28123 ).

     So yeah, I understand HTTP Signature and Webfinger are not ActivityPub, yet they're needed to write Fediverse compatible apps, and if I was reading a book about ActivityPub and I end up not being to build something actually useful with it in the end, I would feel really disappointed (I'm severely biased toward learning by building, though, maybe it's just me).

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 04:28:06 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • kik

     @kik I'm covering Webfinger and HTTP Signature. You're correct, we currently use an old draft version of HTTP Signature.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 04:29:40 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Sal Rahman

     @manlycoffee https://cosocial.ca/@evan/111744202102137669

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     Sal Rahman (manlycoffee@techhub.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 04:29:41 JST Sal Rahman

     in reply to

     @evan

     What's the question, assuming you actually intended to have one in your original post? https://techhub.social/@evan@cosocial.ca/111744179738983358

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 06:00:01 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     My other option is including an implementation of the ActivityPub API, but it would still need to do all the interesting stuff necessary to make a working account.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 06:05:31 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     I think the other downside of this plan is that this is probably the hard way to make a bot. The right way is to make a script that calls the ActivityPub API or Mastodon API. Using an implementation of the ActivityPub protocol is definitely the hard way around.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 06:08:21 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Scanner

     @scanner Oh, yeah, I've already got a command-line ActivityPub API client example. https://github.com/evanp/ap

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     Scanner (scanner@apricot.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 06:08:22 JST Scanner

     in reply to

     @evan I think it would be a very good idea to have a public repo with examples of working code and test harnesses for those examples.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 08:50:56 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Scanner

     @scanner oh absolutely! We have a couple of good projects going now to develop test suites for ActivityPub.

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     Scanner (scanner@apricot.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 08:50:58 JST Scanner

     in reply to

     @evan when I write systems that conform to protocols what I find the most distressing is no way to test except pointing it at various production services. This is a problem that can be solved and is the sort of thing that would help people like me who poke at things in a deep sort of way.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 09:51:59 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • prom™️

     @promovicz I don't understand what you mean. Like, I could add pictures of the bots? Or diagrams of how they work?

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     prom™️ (promovicz@chaos.social)'s status on Saturday, 13-Jan-2024 09:52:00 JST prom™️

     in reply to

     @evan Fair choice IMO. Bots might make a nice illustration subject - if you have some?