ActivityPub

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ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol (W3C Recommendation) developed in the Social Web Working Group based on pump.io and ActivityStreams. Conceptually they were all preceded by OStatus. It was briefly known as ActivityPump before being renamed to ActivityPub.

IndieWeb Examples

Matthias Pfefferle

 Matthias Pfefferle has built the WordPress ActivityPub and NodeInfo plugins which allows his WordPress sites to (at least partially) support the ActivityPub protocol so sites like Mastodon and other parts of the Fediverse view his sites as a federated member. Other sites using this method can be seen at https://the-federation.info/wordpress.

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki added initial support for ActivityPub to his website around 2018-07-04 in order to be able to receive likes & comments, reply to Mastodon users, and so that it can be followed from people using compatible software

As of 2018-07-23, Aaron Parecki has about 64 followers from various ActivityPub profiles, and has a few posts that have received a mix of replies from Mastodon and other ActivityPub users.

Nautilus:

  • turned knowledge of implementing ActivityPub into a separate service that can be used to add ActivityPub to any website, the code is available as Nautilus on GitHub.

Greg McVerry

Greg McVerry uses:

  • native ActivityPub support in Micro.blog which can be viewed @jgmac1106@stream.jgregorymcverry.com he can then send posts from his blog to his ActivityPub instance through Micro.blog

Previously used (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com unresponsive as of 2023-05-25):

  • Mastodon Plugin for Known which enables syndication:
    • Added the Mastodon Plugin for Known to syndicate posts but also used Bridgy to create an instance of his blog at @quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com@quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com.

Jan-Lukas Else

Jan-Lukas Else uses GoBlog, which has native ActivityPub support.

Hammy Havoc

Hammy Havoc added ActivityPub support on the Hammy Havoc blog on 2023-01-01 via the ActivityPub WordPress plugin.

Ryan Barrett

Ryan Barrett uses Bridgy Fed to backfeed ActivityPub interactions from Mastodon etc to his site, eg the interactions on this page and the followers list at the bottom of this page.

Lots more Bridgy Fed users

Since 2019, many more folks have added ActivityPub support to their personal sites via Bridgy Fed.

Bridging

Main article: bridge#ActivityPub

Bridgy Fed

Bridgy Fed is a comprehensive service that translates ActivityPub feeds and interactions to/from IndieWeb sites and protocols.

ActivityPub Notifications to Webmention

Since Mastodon and other ActivityPub implementations often include Microformats on their permalinks, a shortcut for receiving comments from ActivityPub servers is to treat them as webmentions instead of doing the full Inbox processing normally required by ActivityPub.

When your ActivityPub inbox receives a notification:

  • If type is Create
    • and if object.InReplyTo is present and is a URL on your domain
      • then save object.id as "source"
      • save object.InReplyTo as "target"
      • send a webmention to your webmention endpoint with the source and target

Then your site's existing webmention handling will fetch and verify the ActivityPub source URL, and if there are Microformats on the page, will even look like a reply.

Example:

Sending an ActivityPub notification from an IndieWeb website

As more people and services in the IndieWeb build in support for ActivityPub, it's important to remember that competing communication options could happen. Here is a general top-level breakdown of sending an ActivityPub notification for a reply or like.

The u-in-reply-to or u-like-of url will be referred to as the "targetUrl" below, and your post is referred to as the sourceUrl.

  • Fetch the targetUrl via text/html, check for a webmention endpoint.
  • If webmention endpoint exists, abort ActivityPub and send a webmention for sourceUrl to targetUrl
  • If webmention endpoint does not exist, attempt to fetch the targetUrl as application/activity+json
    • If targetUrl doesn't return JSON, targetUrl doesn't accept ActivityPub, abort.
    • If targetUrl returns JSON, check for a top-level @context attribute. This can be an array or a string, check if it contains "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams".
      • If targetUrl's JSON response does not return the right details, abort.
      • If targetUrl's JSON response returns the correct info, check the attributedTo attribute for the author's ActivityPub profile.
        • Fetch the author's ActivityPub profile url as application/activity+json and check top-level inbox attribute for the author's ActivityPub inbox endpoint.
        • Send an ActivityPub notification to the author's ActivityPub inbox endpoint.

Tips & Tricks for Sending ActivityPub notifications

  • Mastodon requires that you include a "Mention" in the tags array, but you also need to include the person's preferredUsername in the post text to show it as a notification.
  • Technically attributedTo can be an object, but this hasn't been seen in the wild yet.

How To

(this section is a stub, please add links to How To articles for ActivityPub)

Software

Open source software that supports ActivityPub:

Services

Services that support ActivityPub:

IndieWebCamp Sessions

(pretty sure there's been more sessions, e.g. re: Bridging that was brainstormed and developed at 2017 or 2018)

Criticism

(this section needs organizing into discrete rational criticisms, even better if they can be filed as issues on the specs and moved to an "Issues" section instead)

  • Why NOT to add AP support to your site: 2023-01-03 Does a Blog Need to Integrate?

    Without a lot of work, a website won’t have the level of functionality a Mastodon account has.

    So if the “integration” at this point is simply a way to auto-post to Mastodon (or any ActivityPub service) where’s the value over something like Zapier, or IFTTT? I don’t see it.

  • Why avoid JSON-LD in your ActivityPub implementations: 2018-11-12 Pleroma, LitePub, ActivityPub and JSON-LD

    … it is a critical obligation of federated social networking service developers to ensure that handling of data is done in the most secure way possible, built on proven fundamentals. I view the inclusion of JSON-LD in the ActivityPub and ActivityStreams 2.0 standards to be harmful toward that obligation.

  • Criticism: https://ruby.social/@benubois/111267597245152198
    • "@manton I gave up on even consuming ActivityPub. It’s an ambitious idea, but wow is it ever complex, verbose, abstract and under defined. It also feels like the wrong abstraction for micropost-like things. JSON Feed and Micropub are much more ergonomic." @benubois October 20, 2023
  • Criticism of RDFisms in AP: https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/111634273843633052
    • "I am not working with AP from a graph database.I am not working against a RDF data modelI am not dealing with RDF projectionsI am not an academic who is working with ontologies From a standards perspective: Every single time weirdness from RDF leaks into JSON, it adds complexity to downstream implementations. If your spec is entirely based on RDF that's one thing. But if your spec disclaims being based on RDF and says "only for extensions," then you can't have your cake and eat it too." @hrefna December 24, 2023

See Also

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