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otl

@[email protected]

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otl , to fediverse

What have I done?! My abomination of an idea of bridging my email and ActivityPub progresses. If you see this message, something is working! Comments replies are welcome as it's a good test of this system :) People keep saying ActivityPub is a lot like email. If it's so similar to email, could I use my email client to interact with the fediverse? Previously I did this by writing a SMTP interface to the Mastodon HTTP API. That worked. But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it's really ActivityPub. The real deal would be working with ActivityPub directly, not the Mastodon HTTP API. And that's now (mostly?) working! In shonky diagram form, sending looks like this: laptop --SMTP--> my_server --ActivityPub--> fediverse Replies look like this: fediverse --ActivityPub--> my_server --SMTP--> mailbox <--IMAP-- laptop my_server translates back and forth between ActivityPub messages and mail messages. For example given the message: Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2024 16:37:59 +1100 From: Oliver Lowe To: [email protected] Subject: test 2 test hello world! The following ActivityPub message is created: { "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "id":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/outbox/1709703480070628170", "type":"Note", "name":"test 2", "to": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting","https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"], "cc": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting"], "published":"2024-03-06T16:37:59+11:00", "attributedTo":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/actor.json", "content":"test hello world!", "mediaType":"text/markdown" } There's still a lot of bugs (of course) and unimplemented bits (of course). I can't call this a proper fediverse service yet. I'm going to roll with this for a bit and see how it holds up.

otl OP ,

> Excuse my ignorance but how will the fediverse defend itself against email spam? That's a good question. Right now there's very little stopping people from spinning up some ActivityPub server and blasting out messages. I'm actually surprised at how little ActivityPub spam there is currently. One of the awesome things about the fediverse is how anti-commercial it is right now. Maybe it's not a major target for spam because there's not a lot of money in it.

otl OP ,

Oh I stopped and thought whether I should. The answer was "probably not" every time...

otl OP ,

> Does it also send you an update of how many upvotes you get? Well, I receive the corresponding ActivityPub "Like"s from the servers. But right now I just drop the message. I suppose that could turn into a mail message with a body like "user X liked your post" or something, but that doesn't feel like a natural mapping to me. I'm also one of those people that hides upvote & boost counts in my Mastodon app ;)

otl OP ,

Thanks for replying from friendica! Confirming message received OK :)

otl OP ,

UNSUBSCRIBE ;)

otl OP ,

UNSUBSCRIBE ;)

otl OP ,

> And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an > executive summary of your memes for the day needs more crypto

otl OP ,

> The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites > guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but > that really harms the ability for new sites to appear. If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites. What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to entry is way, way too high :(

otl OP ,

> The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites > guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but > that really harms the ability for new sites to appear. If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites. What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to entry is way, way too high :(

otl OP ,

> This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet? Yes that's on the list! Now that I have a whole bunch of RFC822 files, (in Maildirs) I can also serve them over read-only NNTP. This was the original goal actually - I like the idea of using the simpler protocol NNTP over IMAP to read stuff.

otl OP ,

Oh wow awesome. Thanks so much! It needs a bit more fleshing out, removing a bit of hardcoding too. And of course I want to publishit under an open source licence too. Thanks for the tip - I've written it down in the growing TODO file! :)

otl OP ,

> I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now. Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?

otl OP ,

Don't tempt me :D

otl OP ,

Hey mate thanks for writing all that down. Gives me a few ideas - in particular how NNTP could fit in to the equation. LKML can be accessed by a usenet client at nntp.lore.kernel.org. In theory, then, it should be possible to at least read both LKML and ActivityPub stuff hosted at the same NNTP server. To get that working means making sure all the conversion and mapping of concepts are as clean as possible. It's a good test! Thanks again!

otl OP ,

> When you specify To: [email protected] how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead? Good question The process of going from that email-like address to an ActivityPub Actor (https URL) is done by [WebFinger]. So whatever we get back from that lookup is who we send the message to. For example, when we look up [email protected] we get this response (truncated for readability): { "rel": "self", "type": "application/activity+json", "href": "https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting", "properties": { "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group" } } The value for type, application/activity+json tells us that we can send ActivityPub stuff to it. You can play around with WebFinger in the browser. * your account: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=binomialchicken%40lemmy.blahaj.zone * my one: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=otl%40apubtest2.srcbeat.com Hope that makes sense? [WebFinger]: https://webfinger.net/

otl , to technology

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