**#ActivityPub support in #Madblog**
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@julian@activitypub.space @general@activitypub.space that would be very cool, but from my understanding Person vs. Group actor are mutually exclusive, so I can't have both on the same handle right?
If that's the case I may have to rethink a bit of the current single-user approach - I guess that I'll need a
@user@example.comPerson actor (or optionally multiple of them) and a@blog@example.comGroup actor. Which AFAIK is similar to what #WriteFreely does, but it requires me to rethink a bit of the general design.I've braindumped my thoughts here for now https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog/issues/21, thanks for the feedback!
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@julian@activitypub.space @general@activitypub.space that would be very cool, but from my understanding Person vs. Group actor are mutually exclusive, so I can't have both on the same handle right?
If that's the case I may have to rethink a bit of the current single-user approach - I guess that I'll need a
@user@example.comPerson actor (or optionally multiple of them) and a@blog@example.comGroup actor. Which AFAIK is similar to what #WriteFreely does, but it requires me to rethink a bit of the general design.I've braindumped my thoughts here for now https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog/issues/21, thanks for the feedback!
> from my understanding Person vs. Group actor are mutually exclusive, so I can't have both on the same handle right?
Correct, while you can have webfinger resolve both a group actor and person actor from a single handle, that gets messy quickly because how the receiving end handles this is not specified. Mastodon for example only takes the first entry, which crucially means if a community and user have the same handle, then one of the actors is inaccessible to Mastodon.
I don't think you need to introduce breaking changes (I hope!), the threadiverse component can be bolted on to existing functionality. In fact, I'd recommend maintaining the existing
Personactor so that microblog compatibility is not impacted. It's not an either-or approach, NodeBB does handle both types effectively.Here are some quick answers to the open questions:
Should the Person actor have its own inbox?
Yes, the Person actor and the Group actor are two separate identities (as far as anybody outside of your instance is concerned.)Outbox representation — Should the Group's outbox contain the Announce
activities, the inner Create activities, or both?This is optional (at least for NodeBB). If you investigate NodeBB's actors, all of their outboxes return an empty OrderedCollection because I simply haven't gotten around to it yet, and I don't know many implementations that read it. Federation works fine without it, but it would make sense to follow Lemmy or Piefed's lead here.
Backwards compatibility — Should Madblog support a "hybrid" mode that sends both Create (for Mastodon) and Announce (for threadiverse)?
Mastodon will correctly de-duplicate the object so sending both
Create(Note/Article)andAnnounce(Create(Note/Article))is fine. The former serves non-threadiverse followers, and the latter ensures threadiverse syncronization capability.NodeBB actually sends three
: Create(Note/Article),Announce(Create(Note/Article)), andAnnounce(Note/Article). That last one is not needed.Separate keypair for the Person actor? If the Person actor eventually needs to sign requests (e.g. for inbox delivery), it would need its own keypair.
I believe so. It was trivial for me to just generate keypairs for everybody, so I don't know off-hand whether things break if your Person actor doesn't have one. It might not resolve in some implementations?
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If you investigate NodeBB's actors, all of their outboxes return an empty OrderedCollection because I simply haven't gotten around to it yet, and I don't know many implementations that read it.
I read from outboxes all the time. But I can't do that with NodeBB
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@silverpill@mitra.social @fabio@manganiello.blog yes, I've just realized that luckily
requestsis smart enough to split header parameters
❯ curl -I -H 'Accept: application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams' https://manganiello.blog/article/Madblog-federated-blogging-from-markdown HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:43:44 GMT content-type: application/activity+json content-length: 69389 last-modified: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:39:54 GMT etag: "81d02d339405c0ec" cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate language: en-US -
If you investigate NodeBB's actors, all of their outboxes return an empty OrderedCollection because I simply haven't gotten around to it yet, and I don't know many implementations that read it.
I read from outboxes all the time. But I can't do that with NodeBB
@silverpill@mitra.social I recall Mitra may be one of a select few
Do you use it to backfill a profile? How often do you query the outbox?
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@silverpill@mitra.social @fabio@manganiello.blog you're right, I completely overlooked that. Also the Python HTTP machinery isn't as clever as I thought so I had to trim parameters manually, but it should work now https://git.fabiomanganiello.com/blacklight/madblog/commit/76e7b72337b1ab7406fb307eb163a9a4097fcc0e
❯ curl -I -H 'Accept: application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"' https://manganiello.blog/article/Madblog-federated-blogging-from-markdown HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:06:01 GMT content-type: application/activity+json content-length: 69389 last-modified: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:39:54 GMT etag: "81d02d339405c0ec" cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate language: en-US -
@julian Yes, to backfill a profile. It is a manual action.
I don't know who else does that, but @jonny is working on adding automatic profile backfill to Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/34597
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@julian Yes, to backfill a profile. It is a manual action.
I don't know who else does that, but @jonny is working on adding automatic profile backfill to Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/34597
@silverpill @julian@activitypub.space I believe @hollo does it as well.
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#ActivityPub support in #Madblog
I am glad to announce that Madblog has now officially joined the #Fediverse family.
Madblog has already supported #Webmentions for the past couple of weeks, allowing your blog posts to be mentioned by other sites with Webmentions support (WordPress, Lemmy, HackerNews...) and get those mentions directly rendered on your page.
It now adds ActivityPub support too, using #Pubby, another little Python library that I've put together myself (just like Webmentions) as a mean to quickly plug ActivityPub support to any Python Web app.
Webmentions and Pubby follow similar principles and implement a similar API, and you can easily use them to add federation support to your existing Web applications - a single
bind_webmentionsorbind_activitypubcall to your existing Flask/FastAPI/Tornado application should suffice for most of the cases.Madblog may have now become the easiest way to publish a federated blog - and perhaps the only way that doesn't require a database, everything is based on plain Markdown files.
If you have a registered domain and a certificate, then hosting your federated blog is now just a matter of:
mkdir -p ~/madblog/markdown cat <<EOF > ~/madblog/markdown/hello-world.md This is my first post on [Madblog](https://git.fabiomanganiello.com/madblog)! EOF docker run -it \ -p 8000:8000 \ -v "$HOME/madblog:/data" \ quay.io/blacklight/madblogAnd Markdown files can be hosted wherever you like - a Git folder, an Obsidian Vault, a Nextcloud Notes installation, a folder on your phone synchronized over SyncThing...
Federation support is also at a quite advanced state compared to e.g. #WriteFreely. It currently supports:
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Interactions rendered on the articles: if you like, boost, quote or reply to an article, all interactions are rendered directly at the bottom of the article (interactions with WriteFreely through federated accounts were kind of lost in the void instead)
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Guestbook support (optional): mentions to the federated Madblog handle that are not in response to articles are now rendered on a separate
/guestbookroute -
Email notifications: all interactions can have email notifications
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Support for quotes, also on Mastodon
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Support for mentions, just drop a
@joe@example.comin your Markdown file and Joe will get a notification -
Support for hashtag federation
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Support for split-domain configurations, you can host your blog on
blog.example.combut have a Fediverse handle like@blog@example.com. Search by direct post URL on Mastodon will work with both cases -
Support for custom profile fields, all rendered on Mastodon, with verification support
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Support for moderation, either through blocklist or allowlist, with support for rules on handles/usernames, URLs, domains or regular expressions
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A partial (but comprehensive for the provided features) implementation of the Mastodon API
If you want you can follow both the profiles of my blogs - they are now both federated:
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My personal blog: @fabio@manganiello.blog (it used to run WriteFreely before, so if you followed it you may need to unfollow it and re-follow it)
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The #Platypush blog: @blog@platypush.tech
https://blog.fabiomanganiello.com/article/Madblog-federated-blogging-from-markdown
@fabio@manganiello.eu @fabio@manganiello.blog @blog omg thank you for the python lib. i was getting ready to write one but extremely good to see i can draw from (credit/depend on/etc.) prior art. adding to the inspo docs!!!
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@julian Yes, to backfill a profile. It is a manual action.
I don't know who else does that, but @jonny is working on adding automatic profile backfill to Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/34597
@silverpill @julian @general Collections are one of the best parts of activitypub/streams and i have no idea why nobody uses them or works on them. like if we embraced the underlying graph structure of the data and used the canonicalization algos that have been developed in the meantime we get all the good parts of atproto (mostly efficient updating the pds system) basically for free
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@silverpill @julian @general Collections are one of the best parts of activitypub/streams and i have no idea why nobody uses them or works on them. like if we embraced the underlying graph structure of the data and used the canonicalization algos that have been developed in the meantime we get all the good parts of atproto (mostly efficient updating the pds system) basically for free
@silverpill @julian @general account backfilling is issue number THIRTY FOUR in mastodon and has >700 thumbs, >200 comments hemming and hawing about how possible it would be for TEN YEARS.
the solution is just "enumerate the outbox" and it's 200 lines.
like we already have a mechanism for reply controls: the reply collection.
for fine-grained post visibility: access control on the outbox collection.
broadcasting feeds and posts between instances: collections
migrations: collections
store and forward, offline-focused AP: collectionsand so on.
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@julian @silverpill ActivityPub API clients dont need their server to backfill thanks to proxyURL, but Actors will look like they haven’t posted
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@julian @silverpill ActivityPub API clients dont need their server to backfill thanks to proxyURL, but Actors will look like they haven’t posted
@django@social.coop sounds like I'll have to implement it sooner rather than later!
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