7 ms·

FediDB – Developer Tools for ActivityPub

110 points by LaSombra 6y ago

sneak 6y ago
Be careful! The fedivedse is filled with lots of crazies: for example, I got dozens of death threats when I built an AP search engine/index. I like decentralized systems but the community is fraught with risk. Hopefully that changes as it becomes less niche.
- jitix 6y ago
  Maybe we should have something akin to spam filters for decentralized social networks. I personally stopped using mastodon for these reasons.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I agree, I think published feeds that list items or accounts to block (as an advisory) that anyone can subscribe to is the future of social media moderation. Right now it's just instance admins deciding unilaterally for their users, which is terrible.
    - grishka 6y ago
      It's not terrible because you can choose your instance. Policies should be a big factor in that choice. If no instances suit you, you could as well host your own.
      - sneak 6y ago
        I do host my own. The admin of one of the most popular instances (17k users) has blocked my instance, preventing those 17k from seeing me, following me, or DMing me. (It also prevents me or any other user of my instance from following any of those 17k users.) This is, quite frankly, a bullshit model that enables censorship. An instance admin shouldn't be allowed by the protocol to decide who you are allowed to read or follow. It's just as bullshit when gmail automatically spam-folders anyone sending mail to gmail users who isn't part of the deliverability cartel. Most gmail users are oblivious to the fact that an ad company is managing their eyeballs and attention so completely.
        adenozine 6y ago
        Sounds like you run a single user instance? Why should any instance be entitled to another instance's users' attention, against the will of the admin? That doesn't make any sense, perhaps you could clarify your position here. It seems like you're saying instance administrators shouldn't have much control over what their users see on the fediverse. That sorta defeats the purpose of it, at least the way I use it. If I have to let someone else decide for my users, that's hardly decentralized. I block single user instances as well, because they're usually a waste of time, but if someone reaches out and makes a case for a whitelist entry, I consider it. That's how it's supposed to be, and that aligns with the guarantees about content quality that I've offered to users. Again, I'd love to hear a more detailed description of your policy ideas, I don't think I understand.
        sneak 6y ago
        > Why should any instance be entitled to another instance's users' attention, against the will of the admin? Because those users want to read and follow users on that other instance? The instance admin has no right to dictate what the users on that server shouldn't be allowed to read or follow. Users should be in ultimate control of what they are allowed to read, not instance admins. Users should be able to opt in or out of filter feeds, whether published by their local admin or anyone else, at their own option. This is a fundamental issue with federated networks, one that has come up with email and again with AP.
        sodality2 6y ago
        >The instance admin has no right to dictate what the users on that server shouldn't be allowed to read or follow. of course they do; they run the server. Whether you think they should is a different story.
        mariusor 6y ago
        If your content is that important for those users, they are free to choose a less restrictive instance.
  - grishka 6y ago
    It's only a matter of time before spam becomes a problem in fediverse. Any system that is open and popular enough will inevitably attract bad actors.
    - polytely 6y ago
      I think it will be less of a problem then for example on twitter , because you can just mute/block/defederate instances that aren't able to control the spam on their instance. There is an incentive to stay small enough so that the mod team can keep up with the amount of work required to keep the community relatively spam free. Unlike twitter there aren't investors that want to keep growing endlessly so the hard problem of moderation at scale can just be sidestepped by the admin by closing instance signups once they reach moderation capacity.
- tuyguntn 6y ago
  > I got dozens of death threats when I built an AP search Do you have any idea why? conspirologist in me says, this could be targeted attack by FB, Twitter to slow down decentralized movement. But I don't want to give my inner conspirologist take over my mind.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Some people think that they can publish information to the unauthenticated web and simultaneously have that information remain, in some sense, under their own control. This belief is false. There is a desire to be able to sort of soft-publish, accessible to the whole internet, but revocable in some way. That's not how publishing works from an information-theoretical standpoint, to say nothing of the internet. A lot of people thought their data was being stolen or misappropriated when their own servers provided it to me via unauthenticated vanilla HTTP requests to public URLs. It sometimes occurs to me that if search engines didn't exist, and you tried to invent them today, profiting off of a downloaded copy of the full text of other people's websites, you would be sued into oblivion.
  - thejohnconway 6y ago
    From what I've been reading, a there is a large contingent in the Fediverse that is against people being easily found. This is due to fears of of harassment and stalking. I think this is not a sustainable view. It is trivial to write a crawler to find people's profiles using open APIs, and even more could be garnered if you scrape pages. If you don't want to be found but must put stuff on the internet, the answer is to not federate.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  I had only very good interactions on Mastodon. It's been the best social network I've ever seen so far.
nanna 6y ago
Does anyonehave any good guides to setting up ActivityPub for a static site like Jekyll?
- a-priori 6y ago
  Honestly, I'd suggest reading the specifications directly. They're quite well written and have lots of examples. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ That said, I'm not sure how much much of ActivityPub you could make use of for a static site? You could definitely publish an Actor and create an Outbox listing your content. You could also have deploy triggers to notify followers when you publish... But how does someone follow you? In order for that to work, there needs to be a server to accept a Follow activity and add them to the Followers collection to be notified on publication.
- mariusor 6y ago
  What do you expect to gain from setting up ActivityPub for your website? ActivityPub requires some semblance of interactivity for some operations, I'm not sure just a static site would qualify.
- riffic 6y ago
  you need a certain amount of interactivity for full compliance with the protocol. perhaps someone can provide a sort of managed service to act as a backend to support this.
- aaronpk 6y ago
  ActivityPub by definition doesn't work with a static site. But check out this project which offloads the ActivityPub parts for any site assuming you can make a request there as part of your static site build process https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/
  - nanna 6y ago
    Interesting, thank you!
orblivion 6y ago
Some friendly feedback, if they're reading this: My profile: I'm someone interested in principle in the fediverse. I have a Mastodon account, and plan to expand my footprint when I get a chance, maybe install Peertube on my site etc. I'm not a developer for anything on it, thus am not familiar with the nuts and bolts, but I'm at least curious about it. With that in mind, I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking at. Is this for people writing clients? And what form does this take, a software suite? If that's the case I wonder why getting started requires an email address. Some parts of the site (list of instances, list of software) seem to be very general resources, which doesn't give much more of a clue what exactly this is about. And then the FAQ answers very specific questions. There's a middle ground that feels missing to me. I do get that this is for helping with testing, and somehow with development in general. Is this like an instance that you can point your client at, that works like Pixelfed, Mastodon etc, but gives more useful error feedback? Saying that explicitly would cover what I'm getting at. Perhaps I'm just not the target market, but it seems like the "what is this" test needs a little more to pass for someone like me.
- gopiandcode 6y ago
  I don't think you're the target audience - it's a tool oriented at people implementing activitypub servers, and provides a set of tools for debugging and testing that an implementation meets the activitypub spec. As someone working on an activitypub implementation, even without any prior knowledge about the tool, from the screenshots and feature list I was immediately able to work out what it was for. Things like verifying message certificates and activitypub compliance were things that I was doing manually in an ad-hoc way before, but this tool seems to provide a standard way of testing it.
  - mariusor 6y ago
    I am part of the target audience (I work on an activitypub server and client) but I still don't know what fedidb can do to help me. I don't agree that requiring an account is the only method through which you can submit your authorization for the domains you want to test against. Hiding _all_ functionality behind a create account pop-up is a pretty dirty pattern.
riffic 6y ago
Content management systems picking up support for ActivityPub in the same way they currently support RSS will probably result in a tipping point for the ecosystem.
hazz99 6y ago
I'm currently trying to implement an ActivityPub-compliant API. It's super hard, and very annoying to get my head around JSON-LD and the various "undocumented" behaviours, especially without mature third-party libraries. Something like this is exactly what I need! Looks fantastic.

110 points by LaSombra 6y ago

Be careful! The fedivedse is filled with lots of crazies: for example, I got dozens of death threats when I built an AP search engine/index. I like decentralized systems but the community is fraught with risk. Hopefully that changes as it becomes less niche.

jitix 6y ago
Maybe we should have something akin to spam filters for decentralized social networks. I personally stopped using mastodon for these reasons.
- sneak 6y ago
  I agree, I think published feeds that list items or accounts to block (as an advisory) that anyone can subscribe to is the future of social media moderation. Right now it's just instance admins deciding unilaterally for their users, which is terrible.
  - grishka 6y ago
    It's not terrible because you can choose your instance. Policies should be a big factor in that choice. If no instances suit you, you could as well host your own.
    - sneak 6y ago
      I do host my own. The admin of one of the most popular instances (17k users) has blocked my instance, preventing those 17k from seeing me, following me, or DMing me. (It also prevents me or any other user of my instance from following any of those 17k users.) This is, quite frankly, a bullshit model that enables censorship. An instance admin shouldn't be allowed by the protocol to decide who you are allowed to read or follow. It's just as bullshit when gmail automatically spam-folders anyone sending mail to gmail users who isn't part of the deliverability cartel. Most gmail users are oblivious to the fact that an ad company is managing their eyeballs and attention so completely.
      - adenozine 6y ago
        Sounds like you run a single user instance? Why should any instance be entitled to another instance's users' attention, against the will of the admin? That doesn't make any sense, perhaps you could clarify your position here. It seems like you're saying instance administrators shouldn't have much control over what their users see on the fediverse. That sorta defeats the purpose of it, at least the way I use it. If I have to let someone else decide for my users, that's hardly decentralized. I block single user instances as well, because they're usually a waste of time, but if someone reaches out and makes a case for a whitelist entry, I consider it. That's how it's supposed to be, and that aligns with the guarantees about content quality that I've offered to users. Again, I'd love to hear a more detailed description of your policy ideas, I don't think I understand.
        sneak 6y ago
        > Why should any instance be entitled to another instance's users' attention, against the will of the admin? Because those users want to read and follow users on that other instance? The instance admin has no right to dictate what the users on that server shouldn't be allowed to read or follow. Users should be in ultimate control of what they are allowed to read, not instance admins. Users should be able to opt in or out of filter feeds, whether published by their local admin or anyone else, at their own option. This is a fundamental issue with federated networks, one that has come up with email and again with AP.
        sodality2 6y ago
        >The instance admin has no right to dictate what the users on that server shouldn't be allowed to read or follow. of course they do; they run the server. Whether you think they should is a different story.
        mariusor 6y ago
        If your content is that important for those users, they are free to choose a less restrictive instance.
- grishka 6y ago
  It's only a matter of time before spam becomes a problem in fediverse. Any system that is open and popular enough will inevitably attract bad actors.
  - polytely 6y ago
    I think it will be less of a problem then for example on twitter , because you can just mute/block/defederate instances that aren't able to control the spam on their instance. There is an incentive to stay small enough so that the mod team can keep up with the amount of work required to keep the community relatively spam free. Unlike twitter there aren't investors that want to keep growing endlessly so the hard problem of moderation at scale can just be sidestepped by the admin by closing instance signups once they reach moderation capacity.
tuyguntn 6y ago
> I got dozens of death threats when I built an AP search Do you have any idea why? conspirologist in me says, this could be targeted attack by FB, Twitter to slow down decentralized movement. But I don't want to give my inner conspirologist take over my mind.
- sneak 6y ago
  Some people think that they can publish information to the unauthenticated web and simultaneously have that information remain, in some sense, under their own control. This belief is false. There is a desire to be able to sort of soft-publish, accessible to the whole internet, but revocable in some way. That's not how publishing works from an information-theoretical standpoint, to say nothing of the internet. A lot of people thought their data was being stolen or misappropriated when their own servers provided it to me via unauthenticated vanilla HTTP requests to public URLs. It sometimes occurs to me that if search engines didn't exist, and you tried to invent them today, profiting off of a downloaded copy of the full text of other people's websites, you would be sued into oblivion.
- thejohnconway 6y ago
  From what I've been reading, a there is a large contingent in the Fediverse that is against people being easily found. This is due to fears of of harassment and stalking. I think this is not a sustainable view. It is trivial to write a crawler to find people's profiles using open APIs, and even more could be garnered if you scrape pages. If you don't want to be found but must put stuff on the internet, the answer is to not federate.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
I had only very good interactions on Mastodon. It's been the best social network I've ever seen so far.

nanna 6y ago

Does anyonehave any good guides to setting up ActivityPub for a static site like Jekyll?

a-priori 6y ago
Honestly, I'd suggest reading the specifications directly. They're quite well written and have lots of examples. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ That said, I'm not sure how much much of ActivityPub you could make use of for a static site? You could definitely publish an Actor and create an Outbox listing your content. You could also have deploy triggers to notify followers when you publish... But how does someone follow you? In order for that to work, there needs to be a server to accept a Follow activity and add them to the Followers collection to be notified on publication.
mariusor 6y ago
What do you expect to gain from setting up ActivityPub for your website? ActivityPub requires some semblance of interactivity for some operations, I'm not sure just a static site would qualify.
riffic 6y ago
you need a certain amount of interactivity for full compliance with the protocol. perhaps someone can provide a sort of managed service to act as a backend to support this.
aaronpk 6y ago
ActivityPub by definition doesn't work with a static site. But check out this project which offloads the ActivityPub parts for any site assuming you can make a request there as part of your static site build process https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/
- nanna 6y ago
  Interesting, thank you!

orblivion 6y ago

Some friendly feedback, if they're reading this: My profile: I'm someone interested in principle in the fediverse. I have a Mastodon account, and plan to expand my footprint when I get a chance, maybe install Peertube on my site etc. I'm not a developer for anything on it, thus am not familiar with the nuts and bolts, but I'm at least curious about it. With that in mind, I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking at. Is this for people writing clients? And what form does this take, a software suite? If that's the case I wonder why getting started requires an email address. Some parts of the site (list of instances, list of software) seem to be very general resources, which doesn't give much more of a clue what exactly this is about. And then the FAQ answers very specific questions. There's a middle ground that feels missing to me. I do get that this is for helping with testing, and somehow with development in general. Is this like an instance that you can point your client at, that works like Pixelfed, Mastodon etc, but gives more useful error feedback? Saying that explicitly would cover what I'm getting at. Perhaps I'm just not the target market, but it seems like the "what is this" test needs a little more to pass for someone like me.

gopiandcode 6y ago
I don't think you're the target audience - it's a tool oriented at people implementing activitypub servers, and provides a set of tools for debugging and testing that an implementation meets the activitypub spec. As someone working on an activitypub implementation, even without any prior knowledge about the tool, from the screenshots and feature list I was immediately able to work out what it was for. Things like verifying message certificates and activitypub compliance were things that I was doing manually in an ad-hoc way before, but this tool seems to provide a standard way of testing it.
- mariusor 6y ago
  I am part of the target audience (I work on an activitypub server and client) but I still don't know what fedidb can do to help me. I don't agree that requiring an account is the only method through which you can submit your authorization for the domains you want to test against. Hiding _all_ functionality behind a create account pop-up is a pretty dirty pattern.

riffic 6y ago

Content management systems picking up support for ActivityPub in the same way they currently support RSS will probably result in a tipping point for the ecosystem.

hazz99 6y ago

I'm currently trying to implement an ActivityPub-compliant API. It's super hard, and very annoying to get my head around JSON-LD and the various "undocumented" behaviours, especially without mature third-party libraries. Something like this is exactly what I need! Looks fantastic.