#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_webmentions or bind_activitypub call 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/madblog

And 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:

• 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)

• Guestbook support (optional): mentions to the federated Madblog handle that are not in response to articles are now rendered on a separate /guestbook route

• Email notifications: all interactions can have email notifications

• Support for quotes, also on Mastodon

• Support for mentions, just drop a @joe@example.com in your Markdown file and Joe will get a notification

• Support for hashtag federation

• Support for split-domain configurations, you can host your blog on blog.example.com but 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

• Support for moderation, either through blocklist or allowlist, with support for rules on handles/usernames, URLs, domains or regular expressions

• 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:

• 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)

• The #Platypush blog: @blog@platypush.tech

https://blog.fabiomanganiello.com/article/Madblog-federated-blogging-from-markdown

#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_webmentions or bind_activitypub call 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/madblog

And 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:

• 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)

• Guestbook support (optional): mentions to the federated Madblog handle that are not in response to articles are now rendered on a separate /guestbook route

• Email notifications: all interactions can have email notifications

• Support for quotes, also on Mastodon

• Support for mentions, just drop a @joe@example.com in your Markdown file and Joe will get a notification

• Support for hashtag federation

• Support for split-domain configurations, you can host your blog on blog.example.com but 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

• Support for moderation, either through blocklist or allowlist, with support for rules on handles/usernames, URLs, domains or regular expressions

• 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:

• 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)

• The #Platypush blog: @blog@platypush.tech

https://blog.fabiomanganiello.com/article/Madblog-federated-blogging-from-markdown

@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

@julian @silverpill ActivityPub API clients dont need their server to backfill thanks to proxyURL, but Actors will look like they haven’t posted

@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: collections

and so on.

@fabio I really, really love it!! I wanted to do the same for quite a long time - but I didn't; and now maybe I can eventually steal your code and RIIR in glorious AGPL!

That said, unfortunately at the moment it's not working for me, I can't open it either in my client, or through my instance's search FWIW, through my instance I'm seeing some "503 Remote SSL certificate could not be verified", while the client just spins a throbber endlessly. No idea where the fault lies, but I do remember reading many times that Mastodon is a flustercluck and a fishy citizen in ActivityPub ...

Anyway, huge applause from me regardless, and hopefully one day I can get to fave the actual post on the blog!

@fabio @liaizon Oh excellent! Please let me know when the new version is live on your blog and I'll test again.

@julian@fietkau.social @liaizon@wake.st it's all live, let me know if it works