April Update on ActivityPub Development

[julian]

Hello all,

It's been quite a cold and rainy March and April, but with a couple nice days in between and warmer days ahead, I'm looking forward to getting outside more.

In the meantime, there's been quite a bit of compatibility fixing and incremental updates to the ActivityPub branch, so there hasn't been anything major to report, but nevertheless, we're getting closer and closer to an alpha.

@oplik0 has been helping me this month with some of the trickier aspects, so thank you!

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Here's a short summary of what's been tackled on our backlog, in no particular order:

Posts from the fediverse can now be linked to, if you wish to share them with others. The "Copy Permalink" button will copy a shareable link to your clipboard, and "View Original Post" will allow you to view the content from its original source instance.

You are now able to see posts from remote users

Minor improvements to mentions so they don't (hopefully) get turned into link previews by Mastodon.

Updates to our link-preview plugin so that uploaded images and external links are added to the attachment property for other instances to consume.

Ability to view Popular topics known to this instance, sort of like Mastodon's "trending" feed.

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Next up would be bigger items like content pruning and better reply handling.

In coordination with @[email protected] from Discourse, we are also working on our category-to-category mirroring implementation. This would be used by the SWICG Forum and Link Sharing Task Force, since we're hoping to have asynchronous discussion via the fediverse.

Finding time to test is hard given our respective time zones, but we're getting close!

[julian]

Oh, one last (huge!) thing to add is that @oplik0 added basic support for the Flag activity.

Accepting this means that reports from other servers can be appropriately responded to from NodeBB.

The other half of this is federating responses back out (e.g. Note deletion, etc.)

This small step is part of our Trust and Safety branch of the ActivityPub work. Without it, we wouldn't feel safe enough to tag a release as an alpha.

[crazycells]

thanks for this great work!

[oplik0]

@julian said in April Update on ActivityPub Development:

Oh, one last (huge!) thing to add is that @oplik0 added basic support for the Flag activity.

Accepting this means that reports from other servers can be appropriately responded to from NodeBB.

While it's not yet on the version running here, upstream the Flag activity now works two-way and even sends/handles Undo for rescinding/deleting a flag (did you know that NodeBB supported rescinding a report? Probably not since it wasn't actually exposed via any UI, just in the API... Well, I'm finally fixing that too ). I think we might be the first/only AP service that can undo flags (but maybe someone will correct me, I only checked Mastodon, Mbin and Lemmy).

So very soon you'll be able to report something here and the moderators on the original instance will see it too.

Some small quirks currently:

• Mastodon uses the instance agent for reports, I think most other software reports as the user instead and the former messes a bit with NodeBB report deduplication - so sadly for now you can only get one report per Mastodon instance, others will be rejected as duplicate.
• The initial reason choice in Mastodon doesn't seem to be federated, just the user-added note...
  • for NodeBB default reasons are just shortcuts to basic user notes in a report...
• For now reports are only forwarded to source instance. Mastodon offers forwarding to all mentioned instances, which makes some sense - since instances that are mentioned inside are very likely to contain that post anyway, so if it's something that should be removed it might be good for them to know too.
• As I mentioned I don't think anything else supports rescinding reports yet

[crazycells]

when I click "view original post" , it gives an error

[julian]

@crazycells on the discourse post? Let's let @[email protected] take a look at that one

[crazycells]

@julian I am not sure but I guess so...

when I clicked the link on the first post of this topic: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/cd43b9f3-c032-44cc-adc8-f32e7ee91901/our-next-meeting/

it takes me here but gives error:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/object/1899f65c062200daec50a4c89ed76dc9