After toiling away at this for a few months, I'm releasing two new Go projects for the fediverse today:

• longdistance, a JSON-LD processor.
• pana, an ActivityStreams library built on longdistance.

I built these projects with the hope to make it easier for folks to get started building on the fediverse themselves. You can read a bit about this on my blog.

(If you happen to have computer touchers in your followers, I would appreciate a boost.)

1/

I think HTML being the default content type for ActivityPub / ActivityStreams is unfortunate in some ways.

HTML was originally a "dumb" document format. But, it is now a "smart" application format — with privacy & security concerns.

https://mastodon.social/@reiver/108237663610634862

You should NOT just take whatever HTML is in the 'content', and put it in the web-browser to view it.

You have to sanitize it. Or, render (unsafe) HTML to (safe) HTML.

Previews in ActivityPub / ActivityStreams is what should bind the disparate software and user-experiences on the Fediverse.

Not the ActivityStreams 'Note'.

...

Previews using 'icon', 'image', 'name', 'summary', etc.

What if a (new type of) Fediverse server automagically created an ActivityPub actor for each hash-tag.

So, for example, if someone on the server used:

⋕banana

(Then if the domain of the server is "example.com") then we would automagically have the actor:

＠banana＠example·com

Probably a group actor.

And it boosted any local post with that hash-tag.

Then you could follow a hash-tag on a server.

ActivityPub outboxes are the new RSS / Atom / WebFeed.

You can just read from them to get a JSON feed of someone's posts.

I.e., you do NOT have to implement the full suite of Fediverse protocols, or Follow, or run your own server, or anything else to get someone's posts on the Fediverse — just read from their outbox.

Is any Fediverse software using or generating the 'View' activity-type?

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-view

You could create view-counts on posts, profiles, etc, using this.

Of course, there are privacy concerns with this.

And, also, what counts as a "view".

Although, I sometimes use a "Like" to indicate I viewed something. If a 'View' was something manual (such a pressing a button) that could be more semantically clean.

1/

This is how a Fediverse Labeler could work.

In particular, This is how a Fediverse Labeler could be represented as ActivityPub / ActivityStreams / JSON-LD data.

I'm looking for your opinions from the developers of the fediverse.

A common HTML web page can contain related links via the <link> tag. I would like to do the same for Activity Streams objects, for example:

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "id": "https://writings.hongminhee.org/ap/2024/12/a-year-with-the-fediverse.json",
  "type": "Article",
  "name": "A year with the fediverse",
  "content": "2024 was truly a year where I was deeply immersed in the fediverse. …",
  "url": "https://writings.hongminhee.org/2024/12/a-year-with-the-fediverse/",
  "attachment": [
    {
      "type": "Link",
      "rel": "alternate",
      "hreflang": "ko",
      "href": "https://writings.hongminhee.org/2024/12/a-year-with-the-fediverse/index.ko-hang-kr.html",
      "mediaType": "text/html"
    },
    {
      "type": "Link",
      "rel": "alternate",
      "hreflang": "ja",
      "href": "https://writings.hongminhee.org/2024/12/a-year-with-the-fediverse/index.ja.html",
      "mediaType": "text/html"
    }
  ]
}

Do you think this makes sense, and would it be appropriate to put Link objects in the attachment?

is this the weirdest code I've ever written?

(spoiler alert: no)

It's an inverted-tree disinheritance scheme to implement the object-oriented #ActivityStreams in #rustLang!

(or since computer scientists are very confused about how trees work, this is just a tree)

https://codeberg.org/Astatide/satyr/src/branch/main/crates/activity-streams