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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I saw the article and thought I'd add ActivityPub support to my site, but it looks like static sites can't really do ActivityPub, is that right? I'd need a server to do the posting/receiving.

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While that's true of ActivityPub, the data format it uses (ActivityStreams, which a form of JSON) could be hosted on a static site separate from the HTML version people are reading, which would at least make the content reference-able on the ActivityPub federated network.

Yeah, that might be worth it. Do you know how easy it would be to output something like that?

Yes, it's about medium effort if starting from scratch with no background knowledge. Mainly because I'm not sure there's any good existing tooling to convert articles to AS. And it wouldn't be complex to implement, but does require some solid time learning the vocabulary, which is intimidating.

Good. Can you please point me at working implementation examples?

I also couldn't find a good tutorial, but another commenter here pointed to this blog post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas...

Maybe it's a good starting point?

The specification itself is similar in practice (technically, it's JSON-LD and not AS. The latter is a subset of the former):

JSON-LD: https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams.jsonld

Human-readable: https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams

W3C maintains a list of implementations [1]. Not sure how up to date it is though.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/tree/master/implement...

You can use a third party (or self hosted, but still separate) server for that.

For Webmentions on static sites, people use https://webmention.io

You can actually probably combine that with https://fed.brid.gy to interact with ActivityPub sites as well!

That sounds like the most likely solution, but I didn't know they already had those, thanks for the tip!

Third party services are very helpful and I'm grateful for them, but I wish it were easier to host personal server applications on the internet. I'd like to be able to host an ActivityPub server myself with only a minimum amount of fuss.

To my knowledge, yes. Though in theory it should be possible to cobble together a static file version that is atleast capable of returning enough data that other users can see it as an AP post and share it, though liking or replies won't work.

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