NodeBB-ActivityPub Bridge Test Instance

@julian Mastodon and other platforms don't understand the concept of threaded conversations, which is why they haven't implemented something like that.

I am not sure how to implement this in ActivityPub, but in the Zot protocol, Hubzilla actually fetches the entire thread from the authoritative source.

So we don't depend on the entire thread being sent to us. We ask for a copy of all of the posts in the thread from the server with the top level post, which arguably is the authoritative version of the thread.

Other servers pushing messages to us is a great way to get notified of new posts, but pulling messages would yield the full conversation.

I am not sure if there is a way to pull in ActivityPub.

julian: If the activity is the thing being forwarded, then an additional complication could arise in that I cannot simply re-sign the activity, as my instance key does not belong to the originating actor. this is indeed an issue that arises due to the following: ActivityPub does not specify any authentication/verification mechanism HTTP Signatures, which the current fediverse uses, are not replayable or relayable. If you're concluding that this makes inbox forwarding impossible with HTTP Signatures, then congratulations, you understand why LD Signatures ended up being used for this (and why FEP-8b32 proposes using Data Integrity Proofs at the LD level as well). It's either that, or find a way to replay entire HTTP messages (so that the HTTP Signature can be validated against the original HTTP interaction). Or otherwise rethink the fundamentals of the fediverse's entire security model.

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems right. I think functionally I'll never encounter a Delete, check the origin, and find that the note hasn't actually been deleted, but stranger things have happened!

Technical stuff ahead 🚨...

This is merely exposing the frontend UI to the already established backend logic.

We have two methods internally that are used for this:

Notes.assert, which when given a object url or id, parses it and attempts to resolve the parent chain all the way to the top-level post. It then creates a topic to house all of those posts. Actors.assert, which when given an object url, id, or handle, creates a local representation of the user. How come "query"/etc. didn't show up?

For both user and post searching, if the passed-in url does not resolve or does not resolve to a processable object, then we do not proceed. It's important to realize that while in an ideal world, we'd all be passing immutable identifiers everywhere, the real world is just a bit messier.

Search queries could be a post or user URL, or a webfinger handle, so additional logic was required to handle those use cases. Most ActivityPub-enabled software I've encountered handle these vanity URLs when queried via ActivityPub — it returns the appropriate representation for processing. Some do not, and so in those cases, those items will not show up in the search results.

@evan@cosocial.ca @tedu@honk.tedunangst.com, @oplik0 and I took a closer look today and found the one place where IDs were not sent with Announce activities.

Let me know if you find any other oddities 🙂

@julian Ooo good point about adding the ? back on.

If you're interested in a non-regex solution, here's what I have - https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/utils.py#L247

@pfefferle@mastodon.social it was actually because of @ in actor IDs - the codepath for choosing a webfinger lookup over just accepting the URL as the ID only checked for its presence, and the code for webfinger lookups was only meant to run for the acct: protocol.

So yeah, not WP fault at all, just a combination of a bug and missing feature 🙂 Now both should be fixed.

@julian

For example, let's say I link out to Evan's profile here. If NodeBB knew that this link had an alternative AP endpoint, then we could redirect the user instead to the local representation of his profile

Wouldn't Evan's AP endpoint be the same as his HTML endpoint?

Most platforms are going to send you to the authoritative profile, which is the one at the user's server.

And if you wanted to redirect a link to a local profile instead of his official profile, you don't need an endpoint to do that. You could simply parse the post and swap out the URL, since you should have data about the user in your database anyway from when you first detected the user.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the use case here, but I am not sure why a platform would not direct you to its own platform for content and profiles.

@omega Right now in pages where there is a list of topics (e.g. /recent, /popular, etc.) there's a filter for "Uncategorized", which would essentially exclude everything else.

It's not as clear cut as excluding or only showing local topics, but that sort of achieves what you want. If you only want to see categorized topics, then you needn't select anything at all. By default, uncategorized topics are not shown.

What I think you're advocating for is a button to filter out ActivityPub topics even if they're categorized. That's where I think I might draw the line, because if a topic is categorized, then it is by that action it is considered (at least by the topic mover) to be related to the overall forum topic.

@trwnh @julian @angus @nutomic groups can have subgroups

Ah it looks like this was covered by Angus' post over on SocialHub

A local reply goes here

@nhl.pl That's correct! That would be the GitHub repo for the new Social Web Incubator Community Group Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (what a mouthful!)

We're still figuring out governance and how to conduct discussions, but that's potential way.

So no markdown, plaintext only.

AT Protocol by Bluesky offers Portable accounts (Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity) so it will end up in exporting profile at /user/yourusername/consent and using it elsewhere.

Whoops, that didn't work, let's try again!!

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Here's another reply with hackernews linked, but also another link on its own line:

Link Preview Image Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters. Timely news source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.

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(slashdot.org)

Okay, let's try again