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What is so hard about implementing ActivityPub? What could have been done better?

I heard often about activityPub being challenging to implement.

Now I know part of this is because, if you are building on activityPub, you want interop with existing platforms such as mastodon, and they do their own thing.

But ignoring that aspect, what is so hard about activityPub? What could have been done better?

I am a software developer, so feel free to use software dev concepts and terms when explaining. Thanks!

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

I don’t think ActivityPub is hard to implement, actually. It’s fairly specific JSON with a weird structure, but that structure isn’t hard to implement.

It does come with an oversight, though; the protocol doesn’t define how to ensure activities propagate to every server. That’s why following a Lemmy community from Mastodon will spam your feed with boosts, and why Mastodon instances all have different amounts of comments and likes on them. Some other things are also underspecified (like how to propagate creates through boosts, are those two events of is boosting a create enough?). These can use some fleshing out.

One thing that’s definitely underspecced is the client-server API. It’s practically impossible to take the spec and write a client for a C2S server that’s also built around the spec, because crucial things like “authentication” simply aren’t specified. Very few servers bother to implement C2S and even fewer of those cover more than the bare basics.

At some point I tried setting up a sort-of-tumblr clone by combining Fedibox with a C2S client, but I found it impossible to set everything up properly, and no other backends seemed to provide more than a basic C2S implementation. There’s potential there, but it’s hard to do it without an opinionated take on the spec that I feel shouldn’t be necessary.

RobotToaster ,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

the protocol doesn’t define how to ensure activities propagate to every server.

Outboxes are kinda that, but as I understand it mastodon’s implementation is deliberately defective.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

They do describe well how “I post something on your timeline” works, but details on “someone else boosted a like on my timeline and I want to inform your server” isn’t as clear.

Lemmy posting boosts of every single activity to every following server is one way to get every server synchronised, but it feels a little like abusing side effects rather than using the protocol as designed.

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