Creating your own federated microblog
fedify.dev
fedify.dev
Looking at the list of goals in the article, the only benefit in addition to what can easily be done with RSS is knowing who follows me. Maybe its just me, but if I'm writing to a blog or a microblog I just don't really care who follows me or even who reads it.
There are more social features built into ActivityPub, likes and shares for example, but at that point I'm likely not running my own server and am trusting a third party to do it for me. The idea that there are multiple hosts I can choose to trust rather than one centralized one feels more like a principled argument than one based on real benefits of, for example, owning my own content or censorship resistance.
That's a bit besides the point though. I'm not saying hosting ActivityPub yourself seems unnecessary, I'm saying that ActivityPub itself seems unnecessary (or at least not worth the costs and overhead).
you generally need a stable IP, and a firewall that'll let people initiate connections from outside your house
- if you want to have comments or backtracks, you can do it with ActivityPub without having people signing up to your site (directly or through some OAuth system)
- If you want to mitigate spam, you can set up your AP blog to only accept messages on the inbox from actors who you whitelist.
- You could have your own Substack where you only send the updates to actors who are paying subscribers.
Regardless, my underlying point really is about what I expect of a microblog. If I'm hosting it myself I just want it to be my little corner of the internet, not a full fledged social media site that I have to maintain. That doesn't mean I'm right or that others don't expect more.
I think the problem is that OP is focused on developing a framework for AP, and he is dogfooding it by developing an application that other people can understand without too many new concepts.
This is good if you want people to get experiments, but it is terrible as a way to present the true potential of the protocol: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/113143389340566731
You can do the same thing with RSS+We mention, which is a way simpler stack and predates ActivityPub by years
Anyway, my point was less "ActivityPub can do everything people can do with RSS" and more "having a mechanism to for bidirectional authenticated messages opens up the possibility of new applications".
The real interesting part will happen when/if more developers realize that ActivityPub can do more than "federated versions of popular social media platforms".
As far as spamming goes, I don't see how WM is any worse than AP. In both protocols your only options are passlists and/or blocklists.
[0]: And an old version that doesn't have an official spec. ActivityPub's issues with spec stagnation and de facto standards is a whole other thing.
Perhaps more advanced URL regex can achieve more fine-grained control but I do still see advantages in pubkey auth (especially if people want to move their content.)
Still, I do find myself wishing for a lighterweight-than-ActivityPub middleground.
I suspect this is because WM is used far less than AP. It also grew out of a community (IndieWeb) where having your own domain is a core tenet.
I think something like Mastodon could work with WM though, since all URLs hang off of user URLs, so you could block by URL prefix, ie "block https://example.com/user1/*".
I guess one danger is that they only serve the page that contains your link to the webmention-validating request. That way they get a backlink but don't have to keep a public outgoing link. They'd have to know that a given request is that validation though, and I'm not sure that'd be very easy.
I'm having good results with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on my blog[1].
there's iroh, which looks like a nice balance of batteries included, and not a bunch of bloat
and pkarr, which does exactly one thing: maps ed25519 keys to DNS records via bittorrent's DHT
i think the big blocker for wider adoption is that browsers, ISPs, and airport wifi are all hostile to general purpose network protocols. you're mostly stuck with TCP, or the quagmire of WebRTC right now. (iroh works in the browser, but it has to go through a relay)
BitTorrent DHT which people don't even realise is there is how it should be
Basically an RSS bridge would work fine. I know such things already exist but it would be cool if it was built into AP.
Right now I just manually post my blog post to my Mastodon account which is perfectly fine.
As a matter of fact, I am working on a fork of a elk right now that is meant to function as a pull-based reader of AP data, so pretty soon you will be able to have your SSG generate an outbox for you and I would get all updates, boost it, etc
I've recently been playing around selfhosting a small single user activitypub server to see how it works. I can't understate how satisfying it's been to wallow in compared to a static site or serverless setup. It unexpectedly tickled that special "oooh, a _system_" part of my brain, a lot.
> There is no search functionality.
This makes sense for the tutorial, but search functionality would be awesome for discovery, both in terms of people finding your blog as well as finding other interesting blogs to follow. Niche blogs seem more difficult to find these days when Google only seems to surface websites with the right keywords.
I think the only use case keeping RSS alive is podcast feeds.