Notices by Julian Fietkau (julian@fietkau.social), page 2

@mro You do a WebFinger request on the AP host domain, and its response will give you a subject with the correct handle domain. See for example this account: https://toot.kif.rocks/@team and its WebFinger response: https://toot.kif.rocks/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:team@toot.kif.rocks This is a Mastodon split-domain setup.

The process is described here: https://www.w3.org/community/reports/socialcg/CG-FINAL-apwf-20240608/#reverse-discovery (step 4 is important for this)

@mro There is a suggested FEP to include the WebFinger resource in the actor document: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/2c59/fep-2c59.md But I have not seen it implemented anywhere. In the meantime, the hacky approach works and is reasonably popular. 😄

I don't want to push you into supporting something you don't want to support. Just keep in mind that your software is showing different account handles than Mastodon for some users.

Do you want me to add Seppo to the overview table anyway?

@silverpill Thanks, that helps me a bit. So I'd set up my client to send the posts I write to all of my multiple servers, and if one of them goes down I'm still reachable on the others with all my stuff? And the idea is that people who reply to me send their replies to all of my servers, or do my servers synchronize themselves on their own?

Maybe I just need to read up on this more...

@mcc @MrCheeze

@mcc @MrCheeze I'm pretty sure there are people today running ActivityPub profiles on redundant servers or using distributed identities, but I have yet to understand how that works for post availability and retention, like how I would know where to go to read their stuff if the place I know them from is gone.

@mcc @MrCheeze Define systematic infrastructure? Mitra exists as a practical implementation compatible with Mastodon, and it implements https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/src/branch/main/c390/fep-c390.md and https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps/src/branch/main/ae97/fep-ae97.md. So you can divorce your identity from your AP instance today if you like. I just don't fully understand what that gets us.

If you decide to take your Bluesky PDS down, does their relay keep serving cached copies of your posts forever? Is that a good thing, do we want that?

@morph 😄 This is pretty deep in the weeds, no worries at all if you're not the target audience!

@Edent Good writeup! To add: originating servers could orchestrate anonymous (on the poll author's side) voting by sending votes from a shadow account instead of the user's real account, moving the knowledge of who voted from the pollster's server to the answerer's. On the fediverse, identity is cheap anyway, so there's not much added potential for abuse. @rimu recently did just that in PieFed, in the context of link aggregator votes.

I finished another #webdev side project and built the QR code generator of my dreams: :fietkau_software: https://fietkau.software/qr

* It's instant, purely client-side, and has no ads or upsells.
* It has a variety of color, shape, and logo embedding options.
* There's PNG and SVG export.

The included logo selection is, let's say, "opinionated" and features lots of familiar faces if you enjoy federated social platforms. 😄

Here are a few example QR codes that all lead back to my Mastodon profile.

@evan An added dimension is that there are some fediverse implementations that are indeed server monoliths, even though most are not.

In a pitch presentation I've previously given, I tried to visualize the differences to closed social networks like this. A dot is supposed to represent one person, and Mastodon is more of a nebula than a single unit.

I'd be open to suggestions for improvement. 🙂

Edit: The next post in your thread has the improvement ideas. 😄 I'll take that on board, thanks!

@tchambers I've been working on multiple projects with it, it's enjoyable.

I don't know the whole Node / other server side TypeScript ecosystem very well, but Fedify with its documentation and examples makes it pretty easy to get started.

Also you messed up your cc. 😉 @hongminhee

@evan I would love to try poutine in this lifetime. Apparently there used to be one single restaurant in this city that made it, but it closed down a few years ago. Gotta hope I can find an opportunity while traveling.

@hongminhee Does it assume that? I don't see it clearly stated in the documentation that the IDs themselves need to be numerically sortable, just that, when given a specific ID, the server needs to be able to retrieve newer or older posts based on it.

Of course sortable snowflake IDs make implementing this easier on the server side.

@hongminhee Nice. 🙂 Does it do anything to the username part?

@gamingonlinux @rdnielsen The "Mastodon effect" is a real thing, but its impact will depend heavily on how a site is set up. I'm surprised a news site would struggle with it.

Discussion on the Mastodon GitHub here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662 A fix seems to be currently planned for 4.4.0.

What am I doing this weekend? Learning #TypeScript, #Deno, and @hongminhee's #Fedify all at the same time, for a project which I'm hoping will be used by many people.

What could possibly go wrong? 💪

@blaine @ch0ccyra1n So I do a lot of stuff in Python including my little ActivityPub projects, and I've found that @takahe has the ActivityPub parts split off into a composable library: https://github.com/jointakahe/taktivitypub

They say it's early in development but it's probably more mature than mine. 😄

It'd be nice to have a framework of sorts in Python that combines AP, WebFinger, HTTP signatures and all that stuff, without the fixed microblogging use case.

So basically yeah I agree!

@PersistentDreamer Pixelfed is an ActivityPub-powered social platform that @dansup is developing. It's focused on photo and image sharing. It's interoperable with Mastodon, so you can follow Pixelfed users from here if you want to. https://pixelfed.org

The above screenshot documents and incident where a post on Meta's Threads was automatically marked as spam for mentioning Pixelfed. This is likely because Pixelfed is a competitor to Instagram and Meta is petty.

@aral @sarajw Going by his GitHub comments, I wouldn't be surprised if Ryan changes the plan to opt-in after sleeping on it. Making a protocol bridge 100% opt-in comes with some thorny interaction design challenges, but the "prompted opt-in" idea that a few people have brought up seems workable. I think that's what I would do in his shoes.

@denisbloodnok @aral @sarajw I do tend to be optimistic with people. 😄

Of course I'm not in his head, but I empathize. He was up pretty late last night of his timezone replying to people, and in that time got the two puzzle pieces "move towards opt-in" and "how an opt-in process could work in practice" figured out, only missing the final commitment. I wouldn't have made a big statement at like 2:30am either, I would've gotten some rest and come back refreshed.

But maybe I'm wrong. We'll see! 🙂

@denisbloodnok @aral @sarajw @yala

Called it. 💪

https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/835#issuecomment-1942046208