Notices by kik (kik@techhub.social)

@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).

So, how is #ActivityPub implementation in #GitLab going? Steadily, if a bit slowly!

In the last four months, we've been working on implementing the first ActivityPub actor, the one allowing to subscribe to projects releases. The ActivityPub part is already written, but there will still be a couple month before it's fully merged. Turns out that the most time consuming part is code review : there is no dedicated team to this (but there is a dedicated developer assisting me, thanks Patrick!), so people reviewing code discover ActivityPub at the time they have to review it (and, by the way, it's incredible how they get out of their way to help a contributor on such a complex subject, they rock). For that reason, we have to make smaller than usual merge requests, splitting the feature as much as possible, and then some again, to make it as easy to understand as possible. And even then it usually takes about a month to get one chunk merged. (more in thread)

@silverpill @helge @team I agree, AP concepts often feel a bit off, not exactly what we need, but then again it's something we've already experienced with HTML, for example ("should it be `<em>`? should it be `<q>`?", "wait, that's not really a list!", "oh well, let's use <div> everywhere", etc).

The real question is how much desirable is interoperability with non forge software. Personally, I would say "as much as possible", that's how we enable rich ecosystems. But I'm totally prepared to get hit in the face by reality when we're deep in implementation and we realize how much trouble it would be. 😅

Hi everyone 👋 I'm Kik, the contributor working on GitLab's implementation of ActivityPub. I've seen there has been a lot of discussions around here, so I decided to make a non-anonymous account to exchange with you all (it's also my first account on Mastodon proper!).

Let me stress it again, though : I'm a contributor to GitLab, not one of their employee, so I don't talk for them. :)

See you around!