39 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
39 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
```
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metadata.title = "ActivityPub Resources"
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metadata.category = "activitypub"
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metadata.date = "2019-09-22 17:50:42 -0400"
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metadata.shortDesc = "A compilation of resources I found useful in learning/implementing ActivityPub."
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```
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This isn't really going to be a blog most, but more of a collection of tidbits and resources I found helpful in implenting the [ActivityPub integration](/meta/2019/reincarnation/#activity-pub) for the new version of my blog.
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This post was last updated on Oct 10, 2019.
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<!-- excerpt-end -->
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### Specs
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- The [ActivityStreams 2.0 spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/) is important, as it's what ActivityPub is built on top of.
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- Similarly, the [AS 2.0 Vocabulary](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/) defines all the objects and activities that AP actually uses in practice (and many more that it doesn't).
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- The [ActivityPub spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) itself is quite useful, despite its many omissions.
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- There's also [LitePub](https://litepub.social/litepub/), which has some extensions to AP.
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- The least useful by far spec is [JSON-LD](https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/) which defines how to use JSON to represent linked data and objects graphs. AS2 and AP are both built on this, but if you're going for a simple implementation (or even a complex one), you can entirely ignore this and treat JSON-LD as plain old JSON objects.
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[This](https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/) is also a helpful resource about how to go about reading the AP specification.
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### Actually Federating
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- Gargron's blog posts on [implementing a basic AP server](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/) and [implementing HTTP signatures](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-and-verify-requests/) are good guides for how to actually get federating with other servers in the wild.
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- [Lain's blog post](https://blog.soykaf.com/post/activity-pub-in-pleroma/) on some of the weird quirks of how ActivityPub actually gets used.
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- [Kaniini's blog post](https://blog.dereferenced.org/federation-what-flows-where-and-why) about how data actually moves through the fediverse.
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### Reference Material
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- Darius Kazemi has a [simple reference implementation](https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub/) of an ActivityPub server written using Node.js.
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- I used the [Pleroma source code](https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/) a great deal when working on my implementation, mainly just because I'm familiar with Elixir.
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- I'd also like to think [my own implementation](https://git.shadowfacts.net/shadowfacts/shadowfacts.net/src/branch/master/lib/activitypub) is fairly approachable (it's about 700 lines of not-too-complicated TypeScript).
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- Ted Unangst has a collection of [sample data](https://jawn.tedunangst.com/a/R526ZQ49MbYt5J4KpR) which is useful for comparing how different implementations represent things in AP.
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### Other
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- For actually testing federation, [ngrok](https://ngrok.com/) is very useful for testing your implementations against others. It creates a tunnel from your local machine to a public domain with HTTPS already setup. Because your code is still running locally, you have access to all your usual debugging tools and can iterate rapidly.
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- Testing against other implementations running locally (be it on your machine or inside a VM/container) lets you access debug logs and see what the other server is actually receiving, which can be quite useful.
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- Darius Kazemi also wrote [an application](https://tinysubversions.com/notes/activitypub-tool/) that lets you send ActivityPub objects directly to other servers, which is useful for testing your application against outside data without polluting other people's instances.
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- Ted Unangst also has his own [compilation of AP-related links](https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/ActivityPub-as-it-has-been-understood).
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