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   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 06-Mar-2026 10:03:09 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   @laurenshof writes an interesting article about Mastodon's client API vs the ActivityPub C2S API https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/

   • Embed this notice
     django (django@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 06-Mar-2026 12:08:10 JST django

     in reply to

     @laurenshof @cwebber nice!

     One push back I would give about Eugen’s quote is about the number of api endpoints…

     I haven’t checked the exact number mastodon has added since 2019, but I’m fairly certain it’s more than those needed by C2S (inbox, outbox, proxy, uploadMedia)!

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 01:41:53 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof I think one thing we'll have to do in the near term is dual-stack on the API client side. Targeted apps with narrow functionality, like a share button, could support both APIs. It's relatively easy to discover which API(s) a server supports.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 01:47:29 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof

     I also think adoption of the ActivityPub API will follow a ratchet pattern between servers and clients.

     We're already seeing a number of server implementations appear.

     This is making clients like https://checkin.swf.pub/ or https://github.com/evanp/ap possible and interesting.

     As these clients increase in functionality and popularity, we're going to see pressure by users on more "mainstream" servers like Mastodon to implement the ActivityPub API.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 01:48:32 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof availability on more servers will unlock more opportunities for clients, and so on.

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     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 01:50:58 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof I don't think it's necessary to get feature parity with the Mastodon API to make this take-off happen.

     The most interesting API clients won't be clones of Elk or Tusky; they'll be implementing games, new social interactions, IOT, events, and so on.

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 01:55:16 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof There's also no reason whatsoever that any server needs to drop its support for the Mastodon API to implement the ActivityPub API. They're not mutually exclusive. Mastodon already implements almost all of the read-only part of the ActivityPub API; they really don't need to do a lot get the read-write portion working.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 01:59:54 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof we also don't have to wait for the Mastodon team to implement the ActivityPub API to use it with Mastodon. It could be implemented by an external group and merged into Mastodon. It could live in a fork like Hometown.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:02:16 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @cwebber @laurenshof we could also implement a façade API server.

     It could provide the ActivityPub API as an interface to clients, and use the Mastodon API as an interface to the server. The façade would just provide a thin translation layer between the two.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:20:46 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Jess👾

     @JessTheUnstill @cwebber @laurenshof I think they have really high standards for submissions, but they're not insuperable.

   • Embed this notice
     Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:20:47 JST Jess👾

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan @cwebber @laurenshof Though the Mastodon maintainers have been pretty resistant to outside PRs from what I've seen

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:33:06 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Bruce Elrick

     @virtuous_sloth yeah, I switched to a new system called Poetry, which fixes some of these. Want to add a bug report, and I will try to get to it this week? I have some other work to do on the code anyway.

   • Embed this notice
     Bruce Elrick (virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:33:07 JST Bruce Elrick

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan I'm not a developer but I am used to seeing a requirements.txt, creating a venv, and installing dependencies. Also seen that for standalone Python apps using pipx or uv, but don't know enough Python to figure out what the intent is in the setup or why it is expecting a Pipfile that isn't there or why it doesn't get generated if that's what's supposed to happen.

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     Bruce Elrick (virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:33:08 JST Bruce Elrick

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan
     Hey Evan... seeing such a nice CLI for your 'ap' project in its README..md, I decided to try playing with it but the setup tries to open a file called Pipfile which does not exist:

     ```shell
     $ rg Pipfile
     setup.py
     4:# Function to read dependencies from Pipfile
     8: pipfile_data = toml.load('Pipfile')
     $ find . -name Pipfile
     $
     ```

     This was after hitting several errors where I had to figure out which OS python package to install, including python3-setuptools, python3-toml, and pipenv.

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     Bruce Elrick (virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca)'s status on Monday, 09-Mar-2026 02:35:09 JST Bruce Elrick

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan Will do.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 12-Mar-2026 02:16:16 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Bruce Elrick

     @virtuous_sloth I posted about this! I should have tagged you.

     https://socialwebfoundation.org/2026/03/10/ap-the-activitypub-api-command-line-client/

   • Embed this notice
     Bruce Elrick (virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 12-Mar-2026 02:16:18 JST Bruce Elrick

     in reply to

     • Evan Prodromou

     @evan Obviously I hadn't done this yet. But I see you switched the instructions to use pipx and I also see that the name there is the full activitypub-cli so I guess you had to register something somewhere. Thanks!

     So the install works and then I try my cosocial.ca account and, of course (in retrospect), it doesn't work because Mastodon doesn't implement the AP C2S API. I knew this but didn't have it in my brain in a form that would have made it obvious when looking at your code. LoL.