Implement ActivityPub

[csarven]

http://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub

Implement AP where applicable. LDP container representation as AS2 collection of items (semantic overlap), and actor's outbox should be high priority. Response body in compact JSON-LD is required.

Going forward, full fleshed ActivityPub implementation should probably be an extension, if the core node-solid-server is to operate as a server in federation mode..

[melvincarvalho]

@csarven I've added a thumbs up to this.

My position was always to give it a year or so, in order to see what traction it gained.

I think the fediverse has done that now, with over a million users, many of whom share our values

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

The issue is that we dont have anyone to work on this. If you'd like to throw some cycles into design, I think that could be helpful.

Possibly a baby step in this is to implement a minimalic webfinger, leading to listing solid on the wiki page.

Another may be to add activity+json to our list of RDF mime types, and send the data to the JSON-LD parser

[rhiaro]

Webfinger is not part of ActivityPub. It uses FYN just like Solid, with some specific predicates from the AS2 vocabulary.

[melvincarvalho]

@rhiaro That's a great point! It should be a separate issue.

I was looking at the comparison matrix here :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse#Fediverse_software_platforms

Where most that have implemented activity pub have also implemented webfinger. They seem to kind of go together. So the quick win would be to become part of the fediverse.

I'm looking at what it would take to be a consumer of the activity+json mime type.

It would seem that adding activity+pub here

https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server/blob/d18dd6e9f06f57f7acfca8683f00c027ecb9ab22/lib/ldp.js#L32

and sending it to the JSON-LD parser might be a good start.

But I dont have an insight into whether or not activity+json data in the wild is valid RDF.

[melvincarvalho]

And I think the other part would be to add it to rdflib here :

https://github.com/linkeddata/rdflib.js/blob/c0f921e1cfe3722a86549174828d32e31b5358db/src/parse.js#L41

With the tests at

https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server/blob/6f160a5f3000862c6f55d68dcda1aeaa52e4a5b9/test/integration/formats-test.js#L23

[melvincarvalho]

Note : After some activity pub integration, it may be possible to get listed here

https://github.com/thefederationinfo/the-federation.info#how-to-get-your-platform-listed

How to get your platform listed

Implement NodeInfo, NodeInfo2, Statistics.json or Mastodon stats API endpoint.

[sebilasse]

@melvincarvalho ActivityPub support is awesome. Could you reopen this issue ?

@rhiaro While I agree that webfinger and ActivityPub are two separate specifications it would be nice to read a sentence about why webfinger can help ActivtyPub to satisfy the Fediverse on https://activitypub.rocks.

[RubenVerborgh]

@sebilasse Note that it is not "closed closed" as in the sense that we wouldn't want to tackle this. Rather, it is tagged "revisit", which means that it is something we want to do at some point in the future.

We've made this change such that open issues reflect current bugs and priorities. So let's not reopen, unless someone wants to be assigned (in which case, be my guest).

[melvincarvalho]

What @RubenVerborgh said. We are still at design phase, we need concrete steps of how to implement this, and we also dont have anyone to assign it to.

I propose to break down the task into smaller chunks, review pieces, and create a plan for implementation. Also needed would be some resources that will commit to testing the maintenance.

IMHO the low hanging fruit right now would be to allow node solid server to become a consumer of activity+json type data. We have recently run it through the JSON-LD playground and there were no alarm bells. One open question I have, is what the activity+json file type is. For example turtle is .ttl, and json-ld is .jsonld, activity+json seems relatively under specified in this regard.

Would like to see this move forward, and given the increased traction of both mastodon and solid, it's possible someone will step up.

[sebilasse]

@melvincarvalho The spec. says

MUST present the ActivityStreams object representation in response to application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", and SHOULD also present the ActivityStreams representation in response to application/activity+json as well

So isn't the filetype .jsonld ? @rhiaro

@RubenVerborgh In general I'd be happy to help with this.
Also pinging @cwebber [-> ActivityPub for SOLID]