Stephan Schwab

I am trying to wrap my head around this and thought I might ask and get some straight answers about #activitypub

I want to build me a little system that sends out messages to different social media services. I’ve already done that for Mastodon and Twitter as a prototype.

Now my question is: I know Mastodon has an API and I can talk to the Mastodon server my account is on. That’s what I have already. What benefits do I get if I were to use #ActivityPub directly? I don’t want to build an instance nor have users. It’s basically like a bot what I want.

As you can see I have a rough idea and am asking for some suggestions about which route to take. Thank you.

Feb 27, 2024 at 1:25pmWeb
Show threadmariusFeb 27, 2024
@snscaimito almost nobody accepts ActivityPub client requests, so your benefit would be 0 at the moment.
Show threadStephan SchwabFeb 27, 2024

@mariusor I see people creating an #ActivityPub server “as a single PHP script" and such. So I'm wondering what the motivation might be?

But then it's clear that it needs an identity and that means account somewhere. It's not going to be something different from "me” - the account I'm using to post this message.

Show threadmariusFeb 27, 2024
@snscaimito if you're planning to run such a server yourself maybe it's worth investigating, but you said you don't want to do that in the first post.
Show threadStephan SchwabFeb 27, 2024
@mariusor My blog runs on a server. I was wondering what else I could do from there.
Show threadmariusFeb 27, 2024
@snscaimito I meant "server" as in "application that serves ActivityPub content", not hardware server.
Show threadStephan SchwabFeb 27, 2024
@mariusor Ok. Understood.
Show threadJason Culverhouse Feb 27, 2024

@snscaimito
you would need a server. It doesn't have to be too complex. You need to implement webfinger (could be a static file in your case if you only have a single actor). You would need to implement a basic `/users/{id}/(inbox|outbox|following|followers)` endpoints.

You would have to track reply to the incoming `Follow` with an accept message and store the URI of the follower so that you can deliver messages to their inbox.

You need a minimum of HTTP Signatures to sign and validate incoming and outgoing messages messages

Then when you bot wants to post something you just deliver the `Create` -> `Note` to the followers.

After that you can chose to respond to replies or mentions that com back to you user's inbox.

Show threadStephan SchwabFeb 27, 2024
@JsonCulverhouse Ah! So the follow thing is like subscribing to a mailing list. That's interesting.