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Comment by pickpuck | Hacker News Reader

Ahh this is so exciting to see so much happening in this space all of a sudden! My quest to get a personal instance running has been a long slog for me personally.

I had been working on an ActivityPub server in Node.js/TypeScript for a while before the Twitter migration. It's got most of the features I'd want in a small server but it's basically bring-your-own-client at the moment.

https://github.com/michaelcpuckett/activitypub-core

Finding all the resources to build a complete server that can interact with other instances isn't easy, so maybe this can help someone. The spec is well worded, but the checklist is confusing, the test server is down, Mastodon has its own rules, etc. Plus you have to have at least a cursory knowledge of JSON-LD/RDF.

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Your project looks super interesting.

I had the idea of running a single user server on CloudFlare Workers and using D2 (their SQLite based db). A light weight JS/TS implementation would be perfect. Looks like you have Postgres planned, it would probably be possible to expand from that to SQLite.

Yeh, that’s what I’d like too (or using one of the other edge compute services)

I work on an ActivityPub server in Go that supports an sqlite backend. Check my bio for details.

Cool idea! I'll start looking into that.

>Ahh this is so exciting to see so much happening in this space all of a sudden!

It's like Elon unknowingly funded this space!

Never underestimate HN's pettiness and spite!

Now it's mainstream to work on a a cool technology that's been around for awhile!

Oh and everyone can act like they weren't bad mouthing the tech and saying it wasn't going to work before.

Visit any Mastodon thread here before Elon's Twitter and it's nothing but negativity.

well, there's more than one person on this website.

also, a lot of these projects have been on a slow simmer for a long time, and are only just now starting to become complete and interesting.

edit: though it does seem to be true that takahe's initial commit was nov 5 :) and personally i don't consider it complete and interesting yet

Yes there are multiple people here, but the general sentiment was negative among most threads.

Go ahead and look over any Mastodon thread a year ago or before.

Generally it was dismissed with "oh it's too niche" or "moderation will be too difficult".

People ignored the communities already on it and the tech overall.

Only until people got pissy about Elon running Twitter instead of hedge funds did the general sentiment here change.

It wasn't about the tech, and not even about Elon specifically, it was the Twitter safe space got taken away.

But now hopefully the people who want that safe space will isolate themselves in mastodon instances that block all others and we can all live in peace from them.

I suspect you may be surprised which instances get islanded off from the rest of the fedi.

Or rather, which ones already are.

I've been in the mastodon world for longer than the Twitter drama, so I'm well aware.

When you block other instances you realize you are islanding yourself off, right? Not the other way around.

Everyone is federated until you block, so you are isolating yourself from the norm when you block others.

It's not too noticeable as the english speaking instances are small currently, but those who don't want wolfballs and friends, or this or that are more isolated than those who do.

It makes sense that those who want to hide views from others are the outliers. Those who want to be open and allowing of diverse thought are more interoperable.

If the majority of servers federate with each other and block the same servers, wouldn't the larger group be the "not islanded" group?

My argument is that if a server behaves in a way that the majority of large servers block it, then it is islanded, not the others.

Is the server ActivityPub Client to Server compliant?

I think this refers to handling JSON ActivityStreams objects at the `/outbox` endpoint for a logged-in user, and then broadcasting those out appropriately. If so, then yes that's the only API that's used. It also handles the uploadMedia endpoint and a few other details that are included in the spec.

I have tried unsuccessfully so far to set up an OAuth provider server along with it, so that you could log in on your phone, etc.

That is great news, one of the few implementations that does it. :D Do you have a demo server set up anywhere? Mine (based on my own activitypub code) is at https://federated.id :D

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