Notices by Julian Fietkau (julian@fietkau.social)

Fun personal announcement: I'm changing jobs! 🙂

Starting in June, I'll be working at @tibhannover with @Lambo and team as a Research Software Engineer.

The job posting is still online, so you can see here what I'll be up to: https://www.tib.eu/en/tib/careers-and-apprenticeships/vacancies/details/stellenausschreibung-nr-7-2026

Basically it's about research data infrastructure, particularly integrating SciOp (https://sciop.net) at TIB. It's exciting stuff, I'm looking forward to it, and I believe I will be working with fun people in- and outside of TIB itself! 😄

@evan Great work! 👍

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116359048796181736

Could be potentially nice for fediverse server testing, as more implementations make the jump to final RFC 9421 HTTP signatures.

On the flip side, ever more complex curl invocations (here: Accept header plus signature fields plus key file, presumably) suggest use of more specialized CLI tools, such as provided by @fedify, or at least scripts/aliases.

Speaking of RFC 9421, which notable fediverse implementations can't handle it yet? Anyone keeping track?

#ActivityPub #FediDev #RFC9421

@Mastodon In the long term, @fedidevs will most likely focus on capabilities outside of the design of Mastodon Collections: longer lists, curation by multiple owners, etc.

Smaller packs more personal in scope might make sense to be moved to a Mastodon Collection. We'll leave it up to everyone to decide which service fits their needs better.

The safety features mentioned in the post (be notified when you are added, ability to remove yourself) will also be provided by our implementation.

@Mastodon Speaking as a contributor of @fedidevs which currently hosts Mastodon “starter packs” at https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/

We're working on interoperability with Mastodon Collections and will use the same technical mechanisms in the future, but completion of this work is months away. We endorse people migrating their Fedidevs starter packs to Mastodon Collections wherever that makes sense.

We were involved with the backend tech behind Mastodon Collections. No competition and no bad blood! 🙂

@mitra @silverpill Congrats on the split-domain support! I have added Mitra to https://correct.webfinger-canary.fietkau.software/#implementation-status

The only feature it's missing for an all-green table row is per-user custom WebFinger domains. I am on a long-term side mission to advocate for ActivityPub platforms to enable personal custom handle domains this way. ☺️

@silverpill Good to know, thank you! IMO there should be no restrictions on the two domains – I use two subdomains for convenience reasons, but platforms should support two completely different domains as well.

At least in my opinion. The vocal opponents of split-domain handles say that a user's handle should tell you where their profile is hosted, and there are nuances around things like domain blocks.

But if you ask me, I should be able to set a custom handle domain in my profile settings. 😄

@hazelnoot @fedify At the very least, Mastodon and Fedify (and by extension Hollo and Ghost) do. Outside of those I'm very unsure! I've seen @silverpill talk about it a bunch, so maybe Mitra supports it as well.

@julian@activitypub.space As I understand the migration path, it's like

1. Able to receive RFC 9421 in addition to draft-cavage
2. Able to send RFC 9421 in addition to draft-cavage
3. Send RFC 9421 by default, but be able to fall back to draft-cavage if needed

So by “can't handle” I meant step 1. 🙂 Although the unspoken step 4 is to remove draft-cavage support once everyone else has taken step 1, I'm ultimately also wondering when we'll get there.

@mariusor @silverpill If your first example is allowed, then I don't know what “Clients MUST NOT embed non-anonymous collections in objects” means.

@mariusor @silverpill Wait – is that restriction only applicable to collection creation? With the context of the surrounding section, I could see that making pragmatic sense.

If so, I might prefer having that be clarified by rewording to e.g. “Clients MUST NOT attempt to create new collections by embedding non-anonymous collections in objects”. Substitute “create or modify” if existing collections should be restricted as well.

@mariusor @silverpill I might be hazy on the goal of this FEP.

If it wants to establish new guidelines (that are particularly beneficial for specific implementation architectures) I'm all for writing that down, but then the intro sentence would need to be revised.

I was going to point at my own actor document noting that Mastodon inlines the `featured` collection, but I guess it doesn't do that anymore. Am I behind the times after all? 😅

@silverpill What is the rationale for “Clients MUST NOT embed non-anonymous collections in objects”?

I see the potential for cache poisoning etc. if we inline collections owned by someone else, but what's the harm in inlining my own collections?

@geniodiabolico I haven't looked at Starling in detail yet, but as I understand it it's intended as a standalone server. Connecting it to your existing blog, regardless of what it runs on, would most likely take some nontrivial programming work. 🫤

Btw @evan, this is my first tags.pub success story, it brought me the parent post ☝️ by someone I do not follow through the ActivityPub hashtag. 🙂

@dansup Yeah, all good here!

@dansup @dave Ah, hm, maybe Mastodon can finalize the JSON-LD context for the FEP soon? Seeing the code here, the placeholder jumped out at me. 😄

@evan @soapdog True. I was talking about this just yesterday, if we wouldn't be better served by something wiki-like to host a software project × FEP implementation matrix instead of asking FEP authors to keep their lists updated.

That aside, in this context I'm thinking about how more implementations in the wild can motivate other implementers. My own website still isn't AP-capable (it's planned, but low priority). If I knew there were a sizable ActivityPoll user base, I'd more likely use it.

@soapdog If you do, be sure to tag @evan! As the FEP author I imagine it would be exciting to hear about new implementations. 🙂

@silverpill @helge I couldn't find any explicit guidance for external contributions in FEP-a4ed. So the expected process would be to simply open a PR? Would that be merged by the respective FEP author or by a repository facilitator?

As you might know, I've been documenting FEP-044f implementations in Bridgy Fed's GitHub issue about that FEP, but I've been hesitant to dump reviewing/merging work on the sole author of FEP-044f just to “upstream” the information.