Steve BateThe #ActivityPub spec says "sharedInbox endpoints SHOULD also be publicly readable OrderedCollection objects containing objects addressed to the Public special collection". Has anybody seen any implementations of this? The spec doesn't specify if the public objects are local to the instance being queried or should only include federated objects (or activities?). Given it's an "inbox" endpoint, I'd guess it's a collection of federated activities (since that's what's posted to the sharedInbox). 🤷
I'm wondering if this could be used (in some fashion) to support local and federated timeline construction using the AP Client-to-Server (C2S) API.
marius@steve in #FedBOX I'm using the instance actor's regular inbox as a sharedInbox for the others.
I'm not sure in which way you're thinking it can help with federated vs. local timeline though, as the simplest logic to do that (IMHO) is to verify the activities' actors if they belong to the same instance as the actor that operates the "client". And for that it does not matter where they've been received.
And, in my experience, building timelines in clients can't really be done at viewing time due to inherent slowness in the AP fetches required. The clients need to buffer the collections locally and then they can apply whatever logic on top.
@mariusor Local would be public posts with the same URI prefix as the authenticated user. Federated content would be cached non-local posts received via AP S2S. I'm exploring if this can be done in a mostly AP-standard way (vs using nonstandard instance actors). An instance actor's inbox doesn't seem like exactly the same thing as a sharedInbox endpoint (which is not really an actor inbox), but I suppose it could be implemented that way internally.
@steve the sharedInbox being a collection belonging to another actor is just an implementation detail.
I would say that there isn't a "standard way" for presenting a user with "timelines" because a timeline is not an ActivityPub element.
You can use any collection to distinguish between the "federated" vs. "local" if that's what you want, and you can use your definition (which in my opinion is quite restrictive), or mine (which allows for presence in the "timeline" of remote objects), if local (by your definition) actors operated on them.
And maybe you're restricting the concept of a "timeline" only to the list of "Create"(maybe "Update"?) activities.
@mariusor Right, that's why I used the phrasing "timeline construction". The typical "timelines" seen in Fedi apps would be constructed using AP collections. However, this sharedInbox endpoint is so ill-defined, I'm not sure how useful it is.
@mariusor If you mean an AP collection/page, that's the intent. That's the only part of the sharedInbox GET that's clear (other than public posts). 😉