Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports

[email protected]

I received an activity with this ID:

https://community.nodebb.org/post/100125#activity/create/1719328808532#activity/announce/1719328833687

It has two #-signs. I think it is not a valid URI: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-3.5

A fragment identifier component is indicated by the presence of a number sign ("#") character and terminated by the end of the URI.

julian

@[email protected] I see it, thanks for reporting, just pushed a fix, let me know if the IDs still look funky.

cronlabspl

@the-skyfoxx can confirm this behavior.

/cc @julian any fix comming (soon)?

julian

@macfan hi, to which issue were you referring to?

the skyfoxx

@julian said in Pre-Alpha ActivityPub-related bug reports:

@macfan hi, to which issue were you referring to?

I think this one: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17867/pre-alpha-activitypub-related-bug-reports/13?_=1719346171531

But seems to work for me now

Mariana Terrazas

This post is deleted!

silverpill

@julian The URL of this topic is https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17867/pre-alpha-activitypub-related-bug-reports
When I make a request with AP Accept header, the server responds with a Collection. Technically, this is not wrong, but I think most people would expect a top-level post (Note / Article) when making such request

julian

@[email protected] you're the first person to have noticed!

It's by design, but of course, can — and maybe should — change. It's part of @[email protected]'s FEP-7888 and its concept of a resolvable collection.

Mapping the topic URL to the top post (or perhaps a redirect to it) would ensure compatibility with Mastodon, but I am unsure of whether that is the best path forward.

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @silverpill why would anyone expect a Note/Article when fetching the URL for an entire thread/topic?

Emelia 👸🏻

@trwnh @julian @silverpill I'd only expect a Note/Article when explicitly requesting the first post in a thread/topic, not when fetching the topic itself

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] that was my thought as well, and why NodeBB currently responds as it does.

Ideally it could be both an Article and a Collection, but now we're really committing to incompatibility there lol

cc @[email protected]

Emelia 👸🏻

@julian @trwnh @silverpill I mean... theoretically ActivityPub allows for multi-typed objects due to json-ld

But will anyone understand that correctly? No idea.

infinite love ⴳ

@thisismissem @julian @silverpill you could generate a document that is both an Article and a Collection but i'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is probably *not* what you want. it's a thread. a thread is a Collection of posts. it's already "ideal" to represent it as a Collection and not an Article.

i suspect the source of confusion is that most other projects don't have threads/topics, they have reply trees which they show below the "top level" post. The URL there is for the post.

silverpill

@trwnh @julian Because it is not clear how client should display this collection. Searching for URL is a common UI pattern: user expects to see a post or a profile as a result (this is not unique to Mastodon).

Server can attempt to fetch the first item in a collection, but NodeBB's FEP-7888 collection doesn't identify itself as a "thread". It has "OrderedCollectionPage" type and properties that many other collections also have

julian

@[email protected] said:

NodeBB's FEP-7888 collection doesn't identify itself as a "thread".

That's because I am not aware of a clear way to signal that my collection is a thread.

Lemmy uses as:Page, which is far too generic of an object type to signal as a thread. Mastodon doesn't even have an external concept of a conversation (oStatus conversation notwithstanding)

@[email protected]

silverpill

@julian Another report: when NodeBB generates an Announce(Create) activity, the ID of Announce has wrong origin. Here's an example:

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "actor": "https://community.nodebb.org/category/30",
  "id": "https://mitra.social/objects/01920059-5b7c-203f-fc4e-285ec442c032#activity/announce/1726582718443",
  "object": ...
  "type": "Announce"
}

ID indicates that activity has originated on my server, but this is not possible

julian

@[email protected] Got it, thanks!

fix: id on 1b12 announces · NodeBB/NodeBB@047d599

Node.js based forum software built for the modern web - fix: id on 1b12 announces · NodeBB/NodeBB@047d599

GitHub (github.com)

infinite love ⴳ

@silverpill @julian Searching for the URL should give you what that URL represents. If you want the post, search for the URL of the post specifically.

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @silverpill We could define a dedicated type for Thread or Conversation or whatever you want to call "a Collection that contains only "post" objects", but it would still be a Collection as well. I think this was something I was considering for a FEP that I ended up never really writing because it felt unnecessary and also very premature. The general idea is to define some way to know what a Collection "contains" -- is it a Conversation or a MediaAlbum or whatever. The problem is taxonomy

infinite love ⴳ

@julian @silverpill Really we need to take a step back and first define what a "post" object is. I'm tentatively leaning toward "any object that has content", but I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases I haven't accounted for that will pop up when thinking more deeply about the issue.