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I need opinions on #Smithereen API.

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Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
  • @grishka cc @technicat who is probably the person who has implemented support for the most fediverse api's to date

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  • I need opinions on API.

    For notifications, which format would you prefer more, this https://smithereen.software/docs/api/methods/notifications.get/ or something even more deduplicated with `wall_posts`, `comments`, `photos`, and `board_topics` as separate arrays? Or maybe something else?

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  • Fedify 1.10.0: Observability foundations for the future debug dashboard

    Fedify is a #TypeScript framework for building #ActivityPub servers that participate in the #fediverse. It reduces the complexity and boilerplate typically required for ActivityPub implementation while providing comprehensive federation capabilities.

    We're excited to announce #Fedify 1.10.0, a focused release that lays critical groundwork for future debugging and observability features. Released on December 24, 2025, this version introduces infrastructure improvements that will enable the upcoming debug dashboard while maintaining full backward compatibility with existing Fedify applications.

    This release represents a transitional step toward Fedify 2.0.0, introducing optional capabilities that will become standard in the next major version. The changes focus on enabling richer observability through OpenTelemetry enhancements and adding prefix scanning capabilities to the key–value store interface.

    Enhanced OpenTelemetry instrumentation

    Fedify 1.10.0 significantly expands OpenTelemetry instrumentation with span events that capture detailed ActivityPub data. These enhancements enable richer observability and debugging capabilities without relying solely on span attributes, which are limited to primitive values.

    The new span events provide complete activity payloads and verification status, making it possible to build comprehensive debugging tools that show the full context of federation operations:

    activitypub.activity.received event on activitypub.inbox span — records the full activity JSON, verification status (activity verified, HTTP signatures verified, Linked Data signatures verified), and actor information activitypub.activity.sent event on activitypub.send_activity span — records the full activity JSON and target inbox URL activitypub.object.fetched event on activitypub.lookup_object span — records the fetched object's type and complete JSON-LD representation

    Additionally, Fedify now instruments previously uncovered operations:

    activitypub.fetch_document span for document loader operations, tracking URL fetching, HTTP redirects, and final document URLs activitypub.verify_key_ownership span for cryptographic key ownership verification, recording actor ID, key ID, verification result, and the verification method used

    These instrumentation improvements emerged from work on issue #234 (Real-time ActivityPub debug dashboard). Rather than introducing a custom observer interface as originally proposed in #323, we leveraged Fedify's existing OpenTelemetry infrastructure to capture rich federation data through span events. This approach provides a standards-based foundation that's composable with existing observability tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, and Grafana Tempo.

    Distributed trace storage with FedifySpanExporter

    Building on the enhanced instrumentation, Fedify 1.10.0 introduces FedifySpanExporter, a new OpenTelemetry SpanExporter that persists ActivityPub activity traces to a KvStore. This enables distributed tracing support across multiple nodes in a Fedify deployment, which is essential for building debug dashboards that can show complete request flows across web servers and background workers.

    The new @fedify/fedify/otel module provides the following types and interfaces:

    import { MemoryKvStore } from "@fedify/fedify"; import { FedifySpanExporter } from "@fedify/fedify/otel"; import { BasicTracerProvider, SimpleSpanProcessor, } from "@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base"; const kv = new MemoryKvStore(); const exporter = new FedifySpanExporter(kv, { ttl: Temporal.Duration.from({ hours: 1 }), }); const provider = new BasicTracerProvider(); provider.addSpanProcessor(new SimpleSpanProcessor(exporter));

    The stored traces can be queried for display in debugging interfaces:

    // Get all activities for a specific trace const activities = await exporter.getActivitiesByTraceId(traceId); // Get recent traces with summary information const recentTraces = await exporter.getRecentTraces({ limit: 100 });

    The exporter supports two storage strategies depending on the KvStore capabilities. When the list() method is available (preferred), it stores individual records with keys like [prefix, traceId, spanId]. When only cas() is available, it uses compare-and-swap operations to append records to arrays stored per trace.

    This infrastructure provides the foundation for implementing a comprehensive debug dashboard as a custom SpanExporter, as outlined in the updated implementation plan for issue #234.

    Optional list() method for KvStore interface

    Fedify 1.10.0 adds an optional list() method to the KvStore interface for enumerating entries by key prefix. This method enables efficient prefix scanning, which is useful for implementing features like distributed trace storage, cache invalidation by prefix, and listing related entries.

    interface KvStore { // ... existing methods list?(prefix?: KvKey): AsyncIterable<KvStoreListEntry>; }

    When the prefix parameter is omitted or empty, list() returns all entries in the store. This is useful for debugging and administrative purposes. All official KvStore implementations have been updated to support this method:

    MemoryKvStore — filters in-memory keys by prefix SqliteKvStore — uses LIKE query with JSON key pattern PostgresKvStore — uses array slice comparison RedisKvStore — uses SCAN with pattern matching and key deserialization DenoKvStore — delegates to Deno KV's built-in list() API WorkersKvStore — uses Cloudflare Workers KV list() with JSON key prefix pattern

    While list() is currently optional to give existing custom KvStore implementations time to add support, it will become a required method in Fedify 2.0.0 (tracked in issue #499). This migration path allows implementers to gradually adopt the new capability throughout the 1.x release cycle.

    The addition of list() support was implemented in pull request #500, which also included the setup of proper testing infrastructure for WorkersKvStore using Vitest with @cloudflare/vitest-pool-workers.

    NestJS 11 and Express 5 support

    Thanks to a contribution from Cho Hasang (@crohasang@hackers.pub), the @fedify/nestjs package now supports NestJS 11 environments that use Express 5. The peer dependency range for Express has been widened to ^4.0.0 || ^5.0.0, eliminating peer dependency conflicts in modern NestJS projects while maintaining backward compatibility with Express 4.

    This change, implemented in pull request #493, keeps the workspace catalog pinned to Express 4 for internal development and test stability while allowing Express 5 in consuming applications.

    What's next

    Fedify 1.10.0 serves as a stepping stone toward the upcoming 2.0.0 release. The optional list() method introduced in this version will become required in 2.0.0, simplifying the interface contract and allowing Fedify internals to rely on prefix scanning being universally available.

    The enhanced #OpenTelemetry instrumentation and FedifySpanExporter provide the foundation for implementing the debug dashboard proposed in issue #234. The next steps include building the web dashboard UI with real-time activity lists, filtering, and JSON inspection capabilities—all as a separate package that leverages the standards-based observability infrastructure introduced in this release.

    Depending on the development timeline and feature priorities, there may be additional 1.x releases before the 2.0.0 migration. For developers building custom KvStore implementations, now is the time to add list() support to prepare for the eventual 2.0.0 upgrade. The implementation patterns used in the official backends provide clear guidance for various storage strategies.

    Acknowledgments

    Special thanks to Cho Hasang (@crohasang@hackers.pub) for the NestJS 11 compatibility improvements, and to all community members who provided feedback and testing for the new observability features.

    For the complete list of changes, bug fixes, and improvements, please refer to the CHANGES.md file in the repository.

    #fedidev #release

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  • @helge

    >used by Mastodon

    They are changing it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30354

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  • I think the wrapping in <p> is just plain good practice because otherwise rendered content could be injected somewhere resulting in invalid HTML.

    Not that browsers ever reject bad HTML anyway heh</p>

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  • @helge @reiver

    >Can you explain what goes on in mitra?

    When mediaType is text/markdown, the entire content is wrapped in a <p> tag. This was done for compatibility with PeerTube. I think <p> was needed to create a space between the title (name) and the content, since title is prepended to content in Mitra (also a compatibility hack -- for Mastodon API clients).

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  • I'd generally discourage RFC7591 in decentralized systems due to the fact that it creates client sprawl (this is currently a problem with Mastodon's client registration mechanism, which is why we created CIMDs) — every client in RFC7591 is a distinct client, with its own client_id and client_secret, which can make client management interfaces difficult to implement (e.g., every time you login on a mobile device or SPA, you'll get a brand new client_id). CIMDs solve this by anchoring client metadata to a URI, and using that URI as the client_id.

    If you need to test clients using CIMDs in development, there is cimd-service however, it's currently targeting the AT Protocol ecosystem (so has a few specifics that at present there that would not necessarily make sense of ActivityPub)

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  • Speaking of handling markdown. I created funfedi.dev Media Types a while ago (and just added it to the navigation). I lost interest when I saw that nobody properly handled the mediaType attribute of a note. Not that I know what I expected.

    Can you explain what goes on in mitra? When mediaType is text/markdown. It changes __bold__ to <p>__bold__</p>, otherwise no paragraph tags. I'm pretty sure, I was once told to use __ for bold and * for emphasize. So my markdown should be good.

    Full example ... input activity -> mitra api response

    Final note: I am not sure what I would want a proper data format to do. I find the solution of W3C ActivityPub (not W3C ActivityStreams) proposes of putting HTML in content and adding source with the original, from which the HTML was generated ok. Of course, this leaves the existence of the summary and name field superfluous.

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Post suggeriti
  • 1 Votes
    1 Posts
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    I've been here for years and I still haven't cracked the Fediverse code.On Twitter I could post "eating cereal" and get 50 bot likes + one crypto bro following me. Here I can post a 30-second video of my cat trying to fight the vacuum cleaner with the caption "me when someone's instance federates with threads dot net" and… absolute silence. Not even a sympathy boost from the admin who literally pays for the server I'm yelling on 😭So please, someone finally explain the secret sauce: Do I need to switch my cat to a vegan gluten-free diet? Do I have to mention systemd negatively in every post? Or is the real trick sacrificing a Raspberry Pi to the old gods of ActivityPub?? #Fediverse #Mastodon #CatsOfMastodon #ActivityPub #SystemdHateClub #PleaseBoostImBeggingYou
  • 0 Votes
    8 Posts
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    @OpinionatedGeek nice, I like that you display explicitly the recipients. So far everyone seems to want to paper over that whole mechanism with the "public" "followers" "mentions" model that Mastodon engendered.
  • 0 Votes
    3 Posts
    37 Views
    blainsmith@snac.rblgk.sh gabboman@app.wafrn.net is.
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    13 Views
    Hello #Fediverse and Happy New Year!I'd like to mark the start of 2025 with the first message from my self-hosted instance. You may already know me as @_elena@mastodon.social. Well, now I also run my own #ActivityPub microblogging server, thanks to the magic of #YunoHost and #GoToSocial (and #Phanpy, which I'm using to compose this).I registered this domain – aseachange.com – a looooong time ago but never did anything with it. It was the very first domain name I ever bought, even before securing elenarossini.com (!!!). It was so long ago, but I remember I was inspired by Beck's album Sea Change. seachange[dot]com was taken, so I grabbed Aseachange.I absolutely love its meaning of profound transformation and I think it's PERFECT for my self-hosted #Fediverse instance and what it represents: independence, empowerment and digital sovereignty.Ever since setting it up, I've been feeling joyful and hopeful. Everytime I look at myself in the mirror, I think: I'm in control of my own social media platform. And it feels SOOO GOOD.What do I have in store for 2025? I plan to use this account to post messages about #selfhosting, learning #Linux, privacy and digital sovereignty.I will also keep posting from my Mastodon account because you don't give a Lamborghini to someone who just passed their driver's license. I barely know what I'm doing here, so I feel a lot safer (for now) keeping my mastodon.social account as well... In case anything goes wrong here. Better safe than sorry!So, this is my #Introduction and if you've read as far as here I just want to thank the Fediverse for being so amazing and allowing me to connect with people on my own terms. And thank you Fedi people for being so generous and supportive with your superb advice and kind words.This is a really magical, special place.Happy New Year, everyone!