You can find the index and other parts of this series here.
We are almost done! Thank you for coming all the way into this journey. In this part we will learn how to broadcast (aka federate) your site posts to your folowers.
Overview The federation of your posts is pretty straighforward:
sequenceDiagram BroadcastTool-Storage: Retrieve followers (actor uris) BroadcastTool-Follower-instance: Get actor info (including inbox uri) BroadcastTool-Filesystem: Get note json (post) BroadcastTool-Follower-inbox: Send a create action (wrapper of note) The Inbox receives POST HTTP requests for different actions.
You can find the index and other parts of this series here.
Let’s dig in into the most controversial part of my guide: the inbox. As far as I know, there is no way to make this inbox static. However, thanks to the fact that ActivityPub does not require the inbox to share the same domain as the other elements, we can host it anywhere.
I believe it could be controversial for two reasons.
I was 11 years old when I became an accessibility advocate in software products thanks to Bill Gates. I did not know the term at the time, and it certainly was not planned. My parents bought a second-hand (or maybe third?) computer from a relative (thank you tío Rafa!), a fragrant IBM PS1 that now included screen colors. This was my second computer; the first one had a retina-damaging green monitor (verde chinga-pupila in Mexico), hacker-style, running DOS and Pascal.
We will take a break from discussing ActivityPub concepts, and I’ll explain how I implemented a very simple “Subscribe” feature for this blog using Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. You don’t need to have your site/blog ActivityPub enabled for this; you will only need a Fediverse account and basic html/css knowledge.
You can also navigate the other parts of this series here.
The Motivation The motivation behind this simple feature is quite strong:
In this blog post, we will explain how to generate the outbox and notes, ready to be shared in the Fediverse.
You can also navigate the other parts of this series here.
Overview In the previous blog post, we created the actor endpoint as a static file. As explained there, this file has a pointer to the outbox, which is a collection of notes. A note in the ActivityPub protocol represents an activity, such as a toot, photo, comment, etc.
In this blog post, we will explain how to make your blog discoverable in the Fediverse as an account, and also address some of the annoying pitfalls I encountered. So let’s get started.
You can also navigate the other parts of this series here.
Overview To enable discovery, we need to implement the webfinger endpoint and the actor file.
As shown in the diagram, Mastodon will first reach the webfinger, which points to the actor file.