Recently, there was a discussion about generic #ActivityPub servers.

[silverpill@mitra.social]

Recently, there was a discussion about generic #ActivityPub servers. Several people claimed that they were working on one, but it turned out that their "generic" servers only support activities defined in the ActivityPub specification. Such a server shouldn't be called generic. It is not difficult to build, neither it is an interesting concept because competing protocols (e.g. Nostr) already offer much more.

I've been writing a #FEP that describes how to build a real generic server. It is not finished yet, but I feel like now is a good time to publish it:

FEP-fc48: Generic ActivityPub server

This kind of server:

- Can process any object type, and can process non-standard activities like EmojiReact.
- Compatible with FEP-ae97 clients.
- Does not require JSON-LD.

I attempted to implement it when I was researching security properties of FEP-ae97 API: https://codeberg.org/silverpill/fep-ae97-server. Back then I didn't know what to do with side effects, but now I think that we can simply force clients to specify them.

Special thanks to @mariusor and @trwnh for their input.

#C2S

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@silverpill lol, based on the "claims" at the begining, why do I feel like the "thanks" at the end should be in quotations?

Also I take umbrage with calling what I've been doing for the past 8 years as "being not difficult to build nor an interesting concept". I feel like you, and other developers having the benefit of dynamically typed programming languages, underestimate how that can be worked into robust APIs when you're limited by less versatile stacks.