What have I done?! My abomination of an idea of bridging my email and ActivityPub progresses. If you see this message, something is working! Comments replies are welcome as it's a good test of this system :) People keep saying ActivityPub is a lot like email. If it's so similar to email, could I use my email client to interact with the fediverse? Previously I did this by writing a SMTP interface to the Mastodon HTTP API. That worked. But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it's really ActivityPub. The real deal would be working with ActivityPub directly, not the Mastodon HTTP API. And that's now (mostly?) working! In shonky diagram form, sending looks like this: laptop --SMTP--> my_server --ActivityPub--> fediverse Replies look like this: fediverse --ActivityPub--> my_server --SMTP--> mailbox <--IMAP-- laptop my_server translates back and forth between ActivityPub messages and mail messages. For example given the message: Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2024 16:37:59 +1100 From: Oliver Lowe To: localtesting@aussie.zone Subject: test 2 test hello world! The following ActivityPub message is created: { "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "id":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/outbox/1709703480070628170", "type":"Note", "name":"test 2", "to": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting","https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"], "cc": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting"], "published":"2024-03-06T16:37:59+11:00", "attributedTo":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/actor.json", "content":"test hello world!", "mediaType":"text/markdown" } There's still a lot of bugs (of course) and unimplemented bits (of course). I can't call this a proper fediverse service yet. I'm going to roll with this for a bit and see how it holds up.
When you specify To: localtesting@aussie.zone how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead?
Looks like a really fun project and honestly, this looks like the future of mailinglists (fuck mailinglists). Do keep working on it. I’d much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.
> I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now. Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?
Darn it, you got me. I hadn’t thought about it more deeply, but now I’ll give it a few minutes.
So yeah, a lemmy UI to LKML would make the experience much better. Obviously the LKML serves two purposes: discussion and code review, for which the latter lemmy probably isn’t too well equipped, but it would help make it more approachable.
Probably to make it work there’d need to be some kind of listener. I imagine signing up to a mailinglist with an email address of the domain running your software would suffice. Incoming emails would then be converted to activitypub messages and sent to the lemmy server you control.
You’d have two classes of email addressed: list email addresses which map to lemmy communities and user email addresses which map to users on the lemmy server (which could also be remote users in the fediverse). The list email addresses are there to create posts in the lemmy community and populate existing lemmy posts (created in the mailinglist) with responses from the mailinglist (response = comment).
A user on lemmy on lemmy commenting on a post from a mailinglist would be automatically signed up to the mailinglist with a user email address that’s dynamically created (I think your email has to be signed up otherwise the mailinglist rejects it). Upon successful signup, the response would be sent using their email address to the maillinglist thread.
The other way around, a comment would show up on lemmy with email address and username of the person that responded on the mailinglist.
(10 minutes later) After writing it out, I’m not sure it’s what you’re doing and more like a bridge, but maybe it’ll inspire you. Who knows. There’s probably something I’m missing and probably this isn’t even what your intention was when you started out with this.
Hey mate thanks for writing all that down. Gives me a few ideas - in particular how NNTP could fit in to the equation. LKML can be accessed by a usenet client at nntp.lore.kernel.org. In theory, then, it should be possible to at least read both LKML and ActivityPub stuff hosted at the same NNTP server. To get that working means making sure all the conversion and mapping of concepts are as clean as possible. It's a good test! Thanks again!
Edit: btw, on friendica you can also add an email address in the permissions screen when composing a new post - so this can also be sent via mail. But this thing is a whole different level
This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet? It’s basically a shared inbox thats whole intent is threaded conversation. Sound familiar?
> This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet? Yes that's on the list! Now that I have a whole bunch of RFC822 files, (in Maildirs) I can also serve them over read-only NNTP. This was the original goal actually - I like the idea of using the simpler protocol NNTP over IMAP to read stuff.
But if you can keep spamming our (heh) a new site for like 99c a domain name, you could do this a lot despite getting banned.
The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but that really harms the ability for new sites to appear.
> The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites > guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but > that really harms the ability for new sites to appear. If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites. What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to entry is way, way too high :(
But if you can keep spamming our (heh) a new site for like 99c a domain name, you could do this a lot despite getting banned.
I mean you already could do that with something like ActivityPub proxy or just change your instance domain every time. If that’s such a risk, why aren’t people doing it now?
> The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites > guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but > that really harms the ability for new sites to appear. If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites. What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to entry is way, way too high :(
I joined fediseer with this lemmy instance. I don’t know what’s going to happen with your self-built software, but getting a guarantee is easy, if your instance looks credible. I’m not aware of anyone that uses it as a filter at this point either.
Anyway, this is an awesome project. If you keep working on it and need a fediseer guarantor for the site, I’m happy to do that.
See their lemmy community: lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/fediseer
Oh wow awesome. Thanks so much! It needs a bit more fleshing out, removing a bit of hardcoding too. And of course I want to publishit under an open source licence too. Thanks for the tip - I've written it down in the growing TODO file! :)
> Excuse my ignorance but how will the fediverse defend itself against email spam? That's a good question. Right now there's very little stopping people from spinning up some ActivityPub server and blasting out messages. I'm actually surprised at how little ActivityPub spam there is currently. One of the awesome things about the fediverse is how anti-commercial it is right now. Maybe it's not a major target for spam because there's not a lot of money in it.
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Sorry… just trying to make you feel a little more at home, I know it must be disorienting coming from Email as that is a very long way away. I tried to learn a little bit about your customs and give you a customary greeting from your culture!
I guess the mods didn’t find this very funny, since they nuked it. Disappointing, because I was able to read it through the magic of caching and it made me crack up laughing
> Does it also send you an update of how many upvotes you get? Well, I receive the corresponding ActivityPub "Like"s from the servers. But right now I just drop the message. I suppose that could turn into a mail message with a body like "user X liked your post" or something, but that doesn't feel like a natural mapping to me. I'm also one of those people that hides upvote & boost counts in my Mastodon app ;)
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