Hi, everybody, so our next presenter is Django Ducey, who's going to talk about some of
the exciting new developments in some of the oldest technology on the Fediverse, the Activity
Pub API or C2S.
Thank you very much.
Hi, everyone.
I'll just introduce myself.
I'm Django Ducey, struggling with the slide thing here, but we're going to get that working.
There we go.
I'm a web developer for a co-lab cooperative.
I'm also an instructor of web design at Nate.
I know they're in Alberta, Institute of Technology.
I got to the Fediverse, at least the Activity Pub Fediverse in around 2018, and with
my WordPress experience, I was like, what can I do?
So I started contributing to Mathiasa's project, the Activity Pub plugin for WordPress.
And I contributed around some other projects over the years.
So yeah, the elephant in the room, I'm going to hat tip to the project.
They've basically built their project with a product in mind.
And what this meant is that they departed from the Activity Pub client portion of the
protocol.
They ended up building a rest API, which allowed a whole ecosystem of apps and
web apps to develop.
In my opinion, the humble opinion, this was a brilliant strategy.
A lot of normies, they need their apps, right?
It's a easy way to get on to social and it's sort of an unexpected experience at this point.
So when I joined, I was really excited to try out all the different third party apps that
existed.
But there has since been some tectonic shifts in the space.
Blue sky and threads over the last two years, three years.
I entered the microbiology space and essentially have slowed down the growth of the Fediverse.
So we can't really rely on more waves of people migrating off of X.
So what's beyond microbiology?
Well, we have traditional blogging.
WordPress is how one of the most popular server types on the Fediverse.
So that's really exciting.
With reports of rampant censorship on US tectoc, there's currently an appetite for alternatives
in sort of short videos.
And loops is a place to take some of that interest in some of that growth.
It can also come from like professional networking or mastodating.
But does the mastodon API make sense for any or all of these?
Probably not.
Looking at some of the projects on the Fediverse, we have photoblogging.
So pixel fed ended up using a sort of mastodon compatible API.
Two went and developed their own API as did let me.
And, you know, mbin and pie fed for those familiar with the project.
I've also used this API.
Mobiles on and Jancy have also developed their own APIs.
So there's kind of a thing where there's redundancy, right?
And they're developing their own APIs when activity pub actually came out with client
to server as part of the spec.
But it wasn't with problems.
Eugene commented to help her mastodon content that the spec is probably bear bones.
No notifications separate from home feed.
Everything is mixed together in the inbox.
No search, no on a complete, no domain blocking, et cetera.
So is it even workable?
Can we even do anything with the client to server API?
Well, Arnold Schriever, also known as Circle Builder on the Fediverse,
started a delightful list of servers that support the API.
Missing from here, I didn't have the icon is bonfire,
really excited about their support for the API.
One of the main problems has been connecting apps to the projects.
Some didn't support OAuth at all.
Some were using custom mpoints.
So what about clients?
There's very few really and status as an Android client that's actually kind of old.
Her has supported it for a while.
Supports Pluroma.
Steve Bate, I don't know if he's here.
You develop a client called flows.
There's also anigmatic by someone named Justin Thomas.
So there is a little bit of movement.
Problems and opportunities really from the Eugene quote earlier,
he mentioned trying to build a timeline.
It's true that notifications, at least the kind that we're used to,
where you get something and it's unread until you've read it.
And then once you've seen the sort of message,
it doesn't show up as unread.
Well, happens when you fetch from the inbox,
is you actually get a bunch of activities.
And this can kind of be a challenge to work with,
because maybe you only want to show the creates and the updates.
You can't really show a delete activity.
But when you get all these activities,
you also get likes.
And so there's an opportunity there to build out custom algorithms,
based on who you're following and what they're interested in.
So you can create a sort of four-year feed.
For my part, I'm building a progressive web app,
tentatively named Sprout for the moment.
And I'm sort of working through,
interrupt with all those,
the different platforms that are supporting the client to serve API.
And generally trying to push boundaries of what we can do with it.
And sort of talking about some of the bugs,
some of the issues.
The activity pub task force has started in September.
There's a bunch of user stories and issues there.
The goal of the task force is to create a base profile,
so that, yeah, developers, clients,
developers of clients and servers will have something to work with,
something not be left in the jar.
So yeah, meetings are next.
Every third, third, third, third day.
Come join as much as for users,
not just for developers of front end and back end.
Users are very welcome to share stories of what they would like from an app,
from a Fediver app.
Thank you.
So, tradition all now for the 10 minutes or else we have one question.
Thank you.
How does that deal with radically different content types you can get from,
from the different services if you have a service,
that's a bit of a technical stick.
Client.
Yeah.
That you could connect.
Mass it on the wall, loop,
or whatever.
They have very different styles of content.
How, how, how.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's going to depend on your server,
what activities it's going to be able to process,
and what shows up in your inbox really.
It's going to be a web client.
I looked at the vocabulary, all the different content types,
and I just created stuff for it.
So, I can, we can handle it.
I guess one of the things that we're looking at is,
like, how do you specify compatibility for posting different content types,
right?
So, if a diploma does the yet support events,
but eventually, you know,
if somebody's trying to post an event,
what should happen, what should be the error type or?
The other thing, sorry, I mean,
to jump in, because I'm passionate about this topic,
is that activity pub comes with fallback representations,
built into the object, right?
So, we have summary to have a text representation.
We have image or icon that you can use.
So, if you get a blurbow, you don't know what it is,
it's still got the summary and the icon,
and you can kind of represent it and use it in your interface.
Thanks.
Great, thank you, Evan, Paul, and Django for your short talks.
Appreciate it.