ActivityPub - Annoyingly useful
Melody 2/2/2024So, ActivityPub. You probably love its existence, considering that you probably found this article (or me or the creator of Wave) over one of the services implementing it, be it Mastodon, Misskey (or one of its many soft and hard forks), Plemora/Akoma or other. And they all do a great job of providing a nice UI for all the things you can do with ActivityPub (except for Akoma, I will stand with my take of its UI being badly made). What you don't see is the protocol layer though. And this is where it gets ugly. ActivityPub has a few parts. Endpoints and what you transmit to and from those endpoints. The endpoints are fine. One inbox and one outbox endpoint per user and the same for the entire server too. Easy to solve with path parameters. The public page (the one you see when visiting the user) could be on that path too or a different one. Don't matter. Easy to do. Webfinger? Also easy to do. Not funky yet. All nice and consistent. The problem is what you have to transmit. Because Activ