Notices by Ben Pate 🤘🏻 (benpate@mastodon.social)

Hey Lutin, thanks for the heads up. This is exactly what Emissary is for. I’ll try contacting the community to see if I can help.

@lutindiscret @zkat

After months of work, I'm excited to share these updates to #Emissary that let you sell #Music on the #Fediverse with #Bandwagon.

* Use YOUR OWN Stripe account
* Sell music as digital downloads
* Sell exclusive memberships to band updates
* 0% fees from me

This is free for everyone now, and will become a part of Bandwagon Premier when it launches later this year. More details are in the blog post:

https://bandwagon.fm/2025-july

Let's go make some noise.

So they’re letting me host a session the #Fedicon conference on August 1st in Vancouver, CA

I’ll probably ramble about: #Music, #UX, and #Commerce on the #Fediverse

What do you all want to talk about?

https://fedicon.ca

Yes.

To be more explicit, and in the context of Bandwagon, album sales are just buying premium access to album downloads. Albums are federated, but the one-time purchase is not.

But you can also make a premium feed using “circles” letting followers buy access to a stream of updates that ARE federated. Members-only items come through as DMs from an otherwise public “Follow”

@silverpill

I’m calling it here. New work on online payments and private news feeds in #Emissary is done.

I still need to do thorough QA and write documentation, but all of the major features are feature complete.

It’s been a frustratingly long road - nearly three months since this kicked off - but I’m super excited to get this out the door.

Expect some cool videos soon, and a final release in the next few weeks.

🎉

I'm often grumpy about how "loose" the #ActivityPub protocol is. So it's important that I also point to positive examples of how to do it well.

https://w3id.org/fep/b2b8: "Long-form Text" is a great set of concrete terms and concepts that moves the #Fediverse forward in some really good ways. As we continue growing beyond "microblogging" we need this, and more stuff like it.

Thank you to @evanprodromou for putting your time into this document. It's a solid investment for everyone.

Yeah, probably, maybe, possibly, idk. It’s all speculation in the absence of a C2S API that developers want to use. I don’t think I could say what any browser maker might do.. esp if they see AP as a threat to their moats.

I want to focus on what WE can do right now. Move the ecosystem forward. Maybe in a few years the W3C will catch up C2S and we can all build to that, too.

But we can’t wait for that before we fix the UX that Tim laid out.

@jupiter_rowland

I understand wanting to bundle things into AP. Let’s fix the core and not abandon it, right?

But the use case here isn’t in ActivityPub. It happens when I’m visiting a website OUTSIDE of my home server. It’s how we see 90% of the internet.

So building this feature into AS doesn’t make sense.

These interactions need to tie more deeply into Fediverse servers in the same way that the FB “like” button does. That’s what FEP-3b86 does.

@rakoo @tchambers

Yes, if browsers understood ActivityPub then the whole world would change. I’d love that.

We’d need everyone on board, but Ms, Apple, and Google might follow if Mozilla and Vivaldi proved it would work.

That would require a working C2S API.

And all of that is years away 😩

I think we get there with incremental, evolutionary steps that prove the Fediverse is viable, and attract more *non techies* to the community.

@rakoo @tchambers

Yes, that would be nice. But I don’t think anyone is holding their breath waiting for C2S to be realistically usable.

For years, we’ve all just filled the gap in C2S with the Mastodon API, which isn’t great.

For the foreseeable future, we’re probably going to have a patchwork of overlapping solutions that all combine into a semi-coherent system. FEP-3b86 is one more patch in the tapestry.

@rakoo @tchambers

I struggled with the UX on this, b/c Emissary lets you identify multiple accounts at once, but I like where I ended up:

1) IF 1 account, just open your home server's "like" page. (needed b/c we're not authenticated on the remote server, it's just a username)

2) IF >1 account, show that damned account picker (but you brought it on yourself)

3) Always show a little link that says... "As ﹫foo and ﹫bar

We can wiggle the specifics, but the general flow is very smooth

@jaz @rakoo @tchambers

Custom protocol handlers would be cool if they're built into every browser, and they always work. But that's a dependency that's brittle, and breaks too easily.

FB wins b/c they have one coherent system that all works together. The Fediverse loses b/c it requires far too much technical knowledge. That's the bottom line of Tim's posts.

So, keep up the fight for custom protocols. But let's also do the things we can *right now* that don't wait for Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

@sl007 @tchambers

The workflow goes like this.

1. User is browsing some site out there and clicks a button to start an activity with that content: Like, Share, whatever.

2. If this is the first time on this site, the site asks them to enter their Fediverse handle (e.g. @benpate). This is stored to simplify subsequent activities.

3... (darned Mastodon character limits)

@tchambers @andypiper

Hey Sebastian, it's awesome that the Social CG is looking into this topic. I scanned your notes, but I'm not totally following your conclusions.

It looks like these are interactions for a C2S mobile app to build stuff on a server. I like the idea of listing out the actions that can be taken on a particular object.

But I don't see how this helps me when I find a URL on the open web. Can you help me understand how this information would be used?

@sl007 @tchambers

3. The site queries my WebFinger entry, looking for an link relation matching my request. So, if I clicked "Like", then the server looks for a relation like: "https://w3id.org/fep/3b86/Like"

4. The server replaces necessary tokens in the link and forwards the user to that URL. For our "Like" example, it would be to a page on Mastodon where I could submit the "Like"

5. "on-success" and "on-cancel" values complete the process, closing pop-ups, or returning to the original page

@tchambers @andypiper

I would love to. I'll get you more details in a reply, but the best start I have is my speed demo from last FediForum: https://fediforum.org/2024-09/

The video is here: https://spectra.video/w/uoxpmziv5MYe6LFEuLdhwH?start=4m53s and the part we care about starts at about 2:49

@tchambers @andypiper

Yes, for sure. Everyone there must be unimaginably busy, so I wouldn't expect it to just jump right into source code any time soon.

But I'd love to get this onto Mastodon's radar somehow.

Mastodon is the tipping point for nearly all improvements to the ecosystem, and I strongly believe this kind of interaction would do wonders for the Fediverse.

So if you have any guidance on how to raise the visibility of this I'd love to know how to proceed.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33984

@andypiper @tchambers

That would be amazing. Thank you!

Even token support from Mastodon (like adding to WebFinger results) would help this FEP gain traction.

I'm out of my element in Ruby, so I can't supply an actual PR, but I'm happy to support this project any way I can. So if anything comes up, I'll be there to help.

@andypiper @tchambers

I opened issues with many of the most popular projects. Fortunately, this kind of thing can be rolled out incrementally, starting with adding a few easy records to WebFinger results.

Further down the road, you could enhance it to include other kinds of interactions that aren't possible now (remote Blocks, anyone?)

Andy, what would be my best next step in getting this on the radar at Mastodon?

@andypiper @tchambers

That’s Tim. Fantastic article! I’ll have more to say after I re-read this a dozen times, but I want to get out early with an answer to #3: remote actions…

This is why I built fep-3b86 “Activity Intents” which lets people take remote actions from their home server with one click and zero fuss. No JS, no funny protocols required.

Could you please weigh in on this?

@tchambers @renchap @dansup @cheeaun @scottjenson @newsmast @andypiper @ricmac @evan @laurenshof @pfefferle @fediversenews @timbray