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受不了包 (shibao@misskey.bubbletea.dev)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2023 05:56:58 JST 受不了包
in reply to
- infinite love ⴳ
- Blake Leonard
@blake@infosec.town @trwnh@mastodon.social hey babe wanna have another hours long debate on the definition of the word "transient" as it applies to activitypub activities 😏

In conversation about a year ago from misskey.bubbletea.dev permalink
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- Blake Leonard (blake@infosec.town)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2023 05:56:59 JST Blake Leonard
  
  This is starting to sound familiarI think if an XMPP server (in the relevant space) had implemented an API inspired by, say, Discord, the whole ecosystem would be seeing a lot more traction right now. The underlying tech is impossibly confusing and incredibly inconsistent, much like the ActivityPub situation (although AP is still way easier to work with than XMPP). Unlike AP, that inconsistency has made using it in most situations difficult enough that Matrix -- Matrix! -- is a better option (you can start by looking at encryption mechanisms! Ad-hoc commands support!). The saving grace for AP was probably Mastodon, which had real traction even before Twitter imploded, because it worked, it worked well, and it was easy to use from every angle. That's why there are so many good Mastodon clients and bots out there and like one "good" XMPP client that's only available on one platform.
  
  RE: https://infosec.town/notes/9kcv8qx2dq34kdo7
  In conversation about a year ago permalink
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  1. Blake Leonard (@blake)
    
    @evan@cosocial.ca I think a lot of this is the complexity of it on both sides. Clients and bots sprung up like crazy on Mastodon primarily because of Mastodon's easy, opinionated API (which is also why it's been added to so many other servers, like Firefish and Pleroma). The AP C2S API doesn't have any opinions on how you use it, which is both a blessing and a curse: it's super powerful, but a challenge to work with, especially consistently. Both the client and federation APIs have inconsistent forms and the contexts are weird, i.e. a spec-valid format may fail to parse correctly on any given server or app. JSON-LD tooling isn't used as widely as you'd expect for this, it's usually "just" a super convoluted parsing framework (and JSON-LD support in languages is sparse. This is beginning to sound familiar). There are also a few critical things missing from the API as specified, namely collections for, say, all public/local posts or conversations that you're in. FedBOX has custom endpoints to handle this, which just grab everything it knows about. I'm planning on a different approach for my own server, using AP C2S for sending messages and updating yourself, and a supplementary REST API for getting conversations, determining who you are, and performing proxied lookups (handling the HTTP signatures at the server side, leveraging the database, and allowing for things like `xmpp:` URIs).

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