What are the activity_id formats for various platforms?
Fediverse
12
Posts
5
Posters
80
Views
-
TL;DR: Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
So, I've rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I'm loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
To make that work, and reduce false positives/negatives, I have to do some pre-flight checks on the URL that's submitted to the search.
Currently, it checks if the domain is to a known federated instance and looks for specific paths in the URL. If it detects the URL is an AP_ID URL, it will only resolve the object and redirect you to it (skipping the lengthy search step). For false negatives, it will pass it to the regular search but still try a federated lookup along with the search.
For Lemmy and Piefed, those are:
/u/for users/c/for communities/post/for posts/comment/for comments.
For Mbin, I think it's the same except it uses
/m/for communities (they call them "magazines" I believe).I think mastoon uses
/useror maybe/username/in the AP identifiers?Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
-
TL;DR: Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
So, I've rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I'm loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
To make that work, and reduce false positives/negatives, I have to do some pre-flight checks on the URL that's submitted to the search.
Currently, it checks if the domain is to a known federated instance and looks for specific paths in the URL. If it detects the URL is an AP_ID URL, it will only resolve the object and redirect you to it (skipping the lengthy search step). For false negatives, it will pass it to the regular search but still try a federated lookup along with the search.
For Lemmy and Piefed, those are:
/u/for users/c/for communities/post/for posts/comment/for comments.
For Mbin, I think it's the same except it uses
/m/for communities (they call them "magazines" I believe).I think mastoon uses
/useror maybe/username/in the AP identifiers?Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
From my own experience querying public mastodon timelines via API (edit: removed incorrect
/api/v1s in the AP_IDs):- Mastodon user accounts have an ActivityPub URI of
https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<username> - Mastodon posts have an ActivityPub URI of
https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<post_author_username>/statuses/<post_id>(they also have aurlproperty ofhttps://<instance.domain.tld>/@<post_author_username>/<post_id>but that tends to serve the html view of the post)
To see for yourself, pick an instance that allows viewing their public timeline without logging in (
mastodon.socialis perfect for this) and follow the "Playing with public data" section of the docs. That page ellides most of the info you're looking for in the example payloads they give (as the JSON payloads themself are quite large and nested), but I can assure you that AP_IDs for user accounts and posts can be found pretty quickly from a single timeline query.I don't think Mastodon has any notion of community, nor does it distinguish between posts and comments (when following a lemmy community, both posts and comments show up in my masto feed as "top-level" statuses (ie posts)).
-
TL;DR: Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
So, I've rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I'm loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
To make that work, and reduce false positives/negatives, I have to do some pre-flight checks on the URL that's submitted to the search.
Currently, it checks if the domain is to a known federated instance and looks for specific paths in the URL. If it detects the URL is an AP_ID URL, it will only resolve the object and redirect you to it (skipping the lengthy search step). For false negatives, it will pass it to the regular search but still try a federated lookup along with the search.
For Lemmy and Piefed, those are:
/u/for users/c/for communities/post/for posts/comment/for comments.
For Mbin, I think it's the same except it uses
/m/for communities (they call them "magazines" I believe).I think mastoon uses
/useror maybe/username/in the AP identifiers?Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
So, I’ve rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I’m loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
Isn't that the whole point of webfinger? Moreover, why would you paint yourself into a corner and hardcode the logic for all the different types of services, if ActivityPub uses JSON-LD and therefore provides a straightforward method for document dereferencing?
I'm not trying to be snarky. It's just that I'm writing ActivityPub server where the id of each object is just an ULID, because to the server there is zero difference between serving the information about an actor or an activity.
-
From my own experience querying public mastodon timelines via API (edit: removed incorrect
/api/v1s in the AP_IDs):- Mastodon user accounts have an ActivityPub URI of
https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<username> - Mastodon posts have an ActivityPub URI of
https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<post_author_username>/statuses/<post_id>(they also have aurlproperty ofhttps://<instance.domain.tld>/@<post_author_username>/<post_id>but that tends to serve the html view of the post)
To see for yourself, pick an instance that allows viewing their public timeline without logging in (
mastodon.socialis perfect for this) and follow the "Playing with public data" section of the docs. That page ellides most of the info you're looking for in the example payloads they give (as the JSON payloads themself are quite large and nested), but I can assure you that AP_IDs for user accounts and posts can be found pretty quickly from a single timeline query.I don't think Mastodon has any notion of community, nor does it distinguish between posts and comments (when following a lemmy community, both posts and comments show up in my masto feed as "top-level" statuses (ie posts)).
Cool, thanks. I was close with
/userguessing from memory.I think the
/users/.../post_idwill be sufficient. It just needs to know that the given URL is an AP_ID before passing it off to the API call toresolveObject. Since it already knowsinstance.domain.tldis a federated instance, it just needs to see if the path is an AP_ID or the HTML (or something else). Thus, I don't have to parse the whole thing, just check that enough of it matches.Thanks!
- Mastodon user accounts have an ActivityPub URI of
-
So, I’ve rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I’m loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
Isn't that the whole point of webfinger? Moreover, why would you paint yourself into a corner and hardcode the logic for all the different types of services, if ActivityPub uses JSON-LD and therefore provides a straightforward method for document dereferencing?
I'm not trying to be snarky. It's just that I'm writing ActivityPub server where the id of each object is just an ULID, because to the server there is zero difference between serving the information about an actor or an activity.
We've had this discussion :)
This application is written against the Lemmy API. It only speaks API. Eventually it'll speak Piefed API as well, but right now, only Lemmy API.
Lemmy and Piefed only do server-to-server Activity Pub and not client-to-server AP. Clients have to use the API to interact with them. This is a Lemmy (and eventually Piefed) client.
-
We've had this discussion :)
This application is written against the Lemmy API. It only speaks API. Eventually it'll speak Piefed API as well, but right now, only Lemmy API.
Lemmy and Piefed only do server-to-server Activity Pub and not client-to-server AP. Clients have to use the API to interact with them. This is a Lemmy (and eventually Piefed) client.
But then why do you worry about the ap_id patterns from other software?
-
TL;DR: Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
So, I've rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I'm loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
To make that work, and reduce false positives/negatives, I have to do some pre-flight checks on the URL that's submitted to the search.
Currently, it checks if the domain is to a known federated instance and looks for specific paths in the URL. If it detects the URL is an AP_ID URL, it will only resolve the object and redirect you to it (skipping the lengthy search step). For false negatives, it will pass it to the regular search but still try a federated lookup along with the search.
For Lemmy and Piefed, those are:
/u/for users/c/for communities/post/for posts/comment/for comments.
For Mbin, I think it's the same except it uses
/m/for communities (they call them "magazines" I believe).I think mastoon uses
/useror maybe/username/in the AP identifiers?Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
admiralpatrick@lemmy.world I think you would be better served by checking for the Link header. NodeBB and WordPress do it, if that gives you some idea of implementation?
-
It took me a minute to find, but it is detailed in evan@cosocial.ca's write up about HTTP Discovery of ActivityPub Objects.
This is probably exactly what you're looking for.
https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-html-discovery/
I think your current approach has merit but is limited. If you know the instance software by URL and can resolve it using path matching without the use of a pre-flight request, that's absolutely a better way forward. The downside is you have to know the URL patterns of every software. You'll never "catch 'em all"!
However, if that method fails, doing a pre-flight check to grab Link also works and is a viable way forward.
You can test against NodeBB users or posts.
-
But then why do you worry about the ap_id patterns from other software?
I'm making an "omnisearch" box.
Paste in an AP_ID into the search field, and it auto-resolves it and redirects you to your instance's local copy (which is very fast) instead of going through the whole search process (which is slow). To prevent false positives, I'm matching the various ap_id formats and only doing the resolution on those; anything else gets passed to search.
Anything else that falls through the cracks just gets passed to search as usual (which also does a resolveObject lookup).
It's to make life easier.
-
I think you would be better served by checking for the Link header
Can't really do that, client-side, in a browser application. CORS is a perpetual cockblock (though I understand why it is), and I'd rather not make an internal API endpoint to do the lookup.
The application polls Lemmy's
getFederatedInstancesAPI endpoint at startup, so it has a list of every activity pub server your instance knows about. That's the first and primary check for the URL that's being searched.The second check is just to rule out non activity pub URLs that point to a federated instance (e..g. https://lemmy.world/modlog, https://lemm.world/pictrs/image/blah.webp, etc).
Goal isn't to "catch 'em all" but to catch the most used ones. If there's one I don't account for, either by omission or because the federated platform didn't exist when I made the patterns, then it will just fall back to a regular search which also includes trying to resolve it as a federated URL (which is the current behavior in all prior versions).
The goal is just to simply short-circuit the search behavior if the query is a known ap_id URL in order to avoid a lengthy search process and quickly redirect you to your instance's local copy.
-
TL;DR: Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
So, I've rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I'm loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.
To make that work, and reduce false positives/negatives, I have to do some pre-flight checks on the URL that's submitted to the search.
Currently, it checks if the domain is to a known federated instance and looks for specific paths in the URL. If it detects the URL is an AP_ID URL, it will only resolve the object and redirect you to it (skipping the lengthy search step). For false negatives, it will pass it to the regular search but still try a federated lookup along with the search.
For Lemmy and Piefed, those are:
/u/for users/c/for communities/post/for posts/comment/for comments.
For Mbin, I think it's the same except it uses
/m/for communities (they call them "magazines" I believe).I think mastoon uses
/useror maybe/username/in the AP identifiers?Any of you who are more familiar with Fediverse platforms that aren't Lemmy/Piefed, can you let me know what the AP_IDs look like for users, posts, comments, and, if applicable, communities?
I maintain my own Lemmy client (Blorp), and this sounds like a cool idea. How do you get your known list of federated instances?
I currently have my own threadiverse crawler I wrote, but I disregard any Lemmy/PieFed instance with <20 monthly active users. That brings the list down to about 63 Lemmy instances and 7 PieFed. I wonder if that list is extensive enough to implement the resolve object mechanism you mentioned.
-
I think you would be better served by checking for the Link header
Can't really do that, client-side, in a browser application. CORS is a perpetual cockblock (though I understand why it is), and I'd rather not make an internal API endpoint to do the lookup.
The application polls Lemmy's
getFederatedInstancesAPI endpoint at startup, so it has a list of every activity pub server your instance knows about. That's the first and primary check for the URL that's being searched.The second check is just to rule out non activity pub URLs that point to a federated instance (e..g. https://lemmy.world/modlog, https://lemm.world/pictrs/image/blah.webp, etc).
Goal isn't to "catch 'em all" but to catch the most used ones. If there's one I don't account for, either by omission or because the federated platform didn't exist when I made the patterns, then it will just fall back to a regular search which also includes trying to resolve it as a federated URL (which is the current behavior in all prior versions).
The goal is just to simply short-circuit the search behavior if the query is a known ap_id URL in order to avoid a lengthy search process and quickly redirect you to your instance's local copy.
Can you not call fetch() to do a HEAD call? Maybe I'm mistaken about it but it should be ok.
CORS is indeed a wrench that gets thrown in when you least expect it...
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
-
A blog requires a platform designed for blogging. Staying within the realm of federated software, the three natural alternatives are:
WordPress, which, thanks to the plugin that makes it compatible with Activitypub, has achieved a level of perfect integration with the Fediverse. Ghost, which, federated a few months ago, is not only a blogging platform but is also specifically designed for creating mailing lists based on the Substack model. Writefreely, which, despite being natively federated, is extremely focused on distraction-free writing and therefore has some seriously limiting features. FriendicaAs for Friendica, I'm a huge fan of that software and manage the second-most active instance in the entire Fediverse. I can assure you that I know it well and appreciate all its most important features. But don't be fooled by the fact that some call it macro-blogging software. In fact, if you visit a Friendica account's profile, it's not possible to filter the Timeline of their posts from the Timeline of the posts they've reshared. So, you could virtually create a page like this:
https://poliverso.org/profile/saio
But you could only do that if you don't share too much other content, otherwise the result would be like this:
https://poliverso.org/profile/notizie
which would be much more confusing 😅
However, Friendica is a very powerful software that allows you to republish your blog feed, as well as automatically reshare your federated blogs. Here I've listed some very interesting Friendica features for blogging:
https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1366-ebfd-2002-91a370393480
So, to recap, if you want to use Friendica to create your blog, you can: you can create a new account. Remember to define it as a "page account," if possible, but also remember that when you reshare content you like, it will appear on your profile page.
Sharkey
However, if you don't need the full suite of tools that characterize a social media platform, you're better off using WordPress.We're talking about software with a very nice interface, but it's still a social networking software. Being essentially a fork of Misskey, it also has a section for creating static pages that can be easily viewed from outside the Fediverse, but these pages can't be federated with Activitypub 😭.
Hubzilla
Ultimately, it seems even less suitable for creating a blog.
If you absolutely must use a Fediverse social media platform, then you'd be better off going with Friendica!PS: There's also a software called Hubzilla, which is compatible with Activitypub, although it has developed its own communication protocol. I'm only mentioning it because it's a feature-rich and well-designed product, but its interface is quite complex and unfriendly, so although I've chosen to mention it, I can't recommend it as an alternative.
-
This post did not contain any content.
-
If you're talking protocols, then why is WordPress there?
If you include Wordpress there are about 100 other softwares that should also show up, but then you also need more paper 😁
-
Been reading some docs and felt like drawing to get a better picture.
Some things to note:
Parenthesis indicate bridges Fed Bridgy and Mostr appear twice because I don't know if they allow cross-communication One-way arrows (→) indicate one-way communication, and two-ways arrows (⇄) indicate the two sides can talk with each other Threads to/from Facebook and Instagram communication appears with an interrogation mark because the information I could find didn't feel conclusive and I don't have an account to test myself Maybe I missed some bridges and protocols, but that'd be more of a lack of knowing; also intentionally ignored X/Twitter > Nitter > RSS > ActicityPub bridges because it felt too much of a stretch.
-
You jest, but I'm pretty sure someone out there made a cli interface for AP.
-
But your saying Peertube should have all the forum functionality of Lemmy, and the endless short video scroll of Loops.
rgluilis suggested a generic server idea, where the media and experience differentiating is done at the client app level. That could work well. But that's an entirely different cincpet and structure.
-
If I have a mutual who is on multiple platforms, and I also have accounts on those same multiple platforms, we would generally be following each other mutually on those same platforms.
-
And that's great! Everyone gets what they want. But suggesting Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Peertube, etc. should all try to do it the way Friendica does, is a bad idea.
