This article is an attempt to disentangle some of the ActivityPub specification terminology. First, some definitions. The specification uses these terms inconsistently, imprecisely or inaccurately. This leads to unnecessary protocol debates and interoperability issues. The following examples show how the text can be interpreted more clearly. Examples Objects are often wrapped in Activities and are … Read more
The toolkit is a web-based development tool for testing and debugging ActivityPub servers that implement the C2S API, built as a Vue 3 single-page application. It speaks to the target server directly over that API. No intermediary service holds the credentials or rewrites the requests, so each request the tool issues is one the server would receive from any other C2S client, which is what makes its results meaningful. Apart from an optional sidecar for diagnosing CORS issues, the application has no backend of its own: the production build is a set of static files that can be served from anywhere.
When someone equates the Fediverse with the Mastodon implementation, fedizens are sure to correct them. The Fediverse is a network of many different implementations that interoperate through the Fediverse protocol stack, although Mastodon is the dominate implementation. When someone equates the Fediverse protocol stack with ActivityPub, they are making the same mistake. The two concepts … Read more
The question seems like it should have an obvious answer, but that’s not necessarily the case. There are several possible interpretations of the term actor in ActivityPub. So, what is an ActivityPub actor? A Profession? According to Oxford’s Advanced Learning Dictionary, an actor is “a person who performs on the stage, on television or in … Read more
The ActivityPub Client-to-Server (C2S) protocol was envisioned as a cornerstone of the decentralized social web, along with the Server-to-Server (S2S) protocol. Standardized by the W3C in 2018, C2S defines how user-facing applications, such as mobile apps or web clients, and bots should interact with social servers using Activity Streams 2.0 and JSON-LD. In theory, it … Read more
Occasionally there are online discussions about using schema.org vocabularies with ActivityPub (AP) and Activity Streams 2.0 (AS2). There are many ways to do this, but this article will explore one approach using a schema.org Recipe type. The information is focused on AP/AS2 messaging rather than user interface considerations related to displaying the recipe. Although the … Read more
Initial ActivityPub authorization (authz) support has been added to the FIRM software. It’s a plugin and specific implementations can customize the policies. Unfortunately, ActivityPub has very minimal guidance on authorization and access control, so different implementations may use significantly different policies. This initial version is relatively simple. In the future, I plan to explore other, … Read more
Version 0.2.0 of the FIRM Server has been released. This version adds support for Linked Data storage and queries. The new RdfResourceStore uses Oxigraph to store RDF information for ActivityPub and other types of data. The FIRM Core logic is the same whether the data is plain JSON stored on the filesystem, or RDF triples … Read more
FIRM is a Federated Information Resource Manager. It’s a flexible server platform for experimentation with ActivityPub and Social Web software. The focus is not on performance or scalability, but on the ability to create rapid prototypes of new functionality. This is a work in progress so expect bugs and breaking changes. The source code is … Read more
There has been discussion about using ActivityPub (AP) for federated home automation or Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This article describes some related experimentation.