I'm currently going through the pain of ActivityPubbing my blog. The single thought that is screaming out at me right now is, 'If we want to encourage a web of independent micro-servers, we must do more to help each other get the protocols right.'
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I'm currently going through the pain of ActivityPubbing my blog. The single thought that is screaming out at me right now is, 'If we want to encourage a web of independent micro-servers, we must do more to help each other get the protocols right.'
I really think there ought to be the means in AP to send diagnostic information back to a sender if a receiver can't work with a given message, like, 'You didn't give me an inbox.'
Am I alone in these thoughts?
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@[email protected] You are not wrong.. the current state of rejection handling in the fediverse is pretty abysmal.
Servers by-and-large in my experience send a 200-level HTTP response once the request is deemed processable (but before processing occurs). I imagine this is for throughput purposes (deferred processing, etc.) as well as to work around resource constraints and queued jobs for certain softwares.
But the really annoying part is if after the fact, the received object is not processable for any number of reasons, there's literally no way to communicate this back.
For example, let's say you send a non-public activity to NodeBB, which doesn't handle them. NodeBB sends you back a reject, but Mastodon will happily ignore it and you will be none the wiser.
NodeBB sends
Reject
activities, but I am pretty sure nobody listens to them.Okay, so let's take this a step further and not send back the 200 right away... let's process it and reject with a 400 or 500... I don't know what would happen, but my pessimistic expectation is that I'll just be resent the same activity over and over again.