Notices by Blake Leonard (blake@infosec.town)

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

It appears the prevailing mechanism for DMs over #ActivityPub is just direct Notes. Misskey/Firefish mark it as a DM with a non-standard field. Pixelfed either doesn't have any DM distinguisher, or it uses a different non-standard field. Pleroma uses a non-standard type ChatMessage and appears to apply certain special logistics to it (i.e. only one person, and it must be a single Actor, may be specified, and only in the to field).

Maybe the mechanism for Babilejo will aim for maximum compatibility with "type": ["Note", "ChatMessage", "https://joinbabilejo.org/ns/type#ChatMessage"], the Misskey special field, and treating the Babilejo ChatMessage type (and the Pleroma ChatMessage type) as a descendant of Note. That way, I don't have to have any special compatibility mode (as long as all the popular projects are spec-compliant, accepting multiple types...)