#dev 2023-03-25
2023-03-25 UTC
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prologic Q: What does a correct unfollow activity look like?
# prologic It's an Undo+Follow right? But having trouble with this :/
# prologic I think this is gonng be more complicated than I thought :)
# prologic I think I'm working it out
# prologic unfortunately I don't track that, so hoping I don't need it or have to
# prologic I literally use random uuids for ids basically everywhere (almost) becuase I just don't car eabout ids
# prologic [snarfed] ++
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[chrisbergr] Does that implies, in reverse, that follow is not an IndieWeb concept or that there is no IndieWeb way to follow others?
# [chrisbergr] Or rather, it means that for silos follow is just another name for subscibing.
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Loqi 👣 follow is a common feature (and often UI button) in silo UIs (like Twitter) that adds updates from that profile (typically a person) to the stream shown in an integrated reader, and sometimes creates a follow post either in the follower's stream ("… followed …" or "… is following …") thus visible to their followers, and/or in the notifications of the user being followed ("… followed you") https://indieweb.org/follow
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# [chrisbergr] [tantek] thx. If I get it right, to follow others means different things depending on the intention of the follower. And in your case, when you post that you follow potus, you're doing this with "following as recommendation" intended?
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# prologic [snarfed] Do you see anything obviously wrong in this activity?
# prologic {\"@context\":[\"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams\",\"https://w3id.org/security/v1\"],\"id\":\"https://yarn.mills.io/#01GWBBANNRKVAH5R7YRK84SYSE\",\"type\":\"Undo\",\"actor\":\"https://yarn.mills.io/user/james/\",\"object\":{\"@context\":[\"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams\",\"https://w3id.org/security/v1\"],\"id\":\"https://yarn.mills.io/#01GWBBANNRKVAH5R7YRK84SYSE\",\"type\":\"Follow\",\"actor\":\"https://yarn.mi
# prologic lls.i
# prologic o/user/james/\",\"object\":\"https://gts.mills.io/users/prologic\",\"to\":\"https://gts.mills.io/users/prologic\"},\"to\":\"https://gts.mills.io/users/prologic\"}
# prologic Oh bloody hell that doesn't quite work on IRC as a single line :D
# prologic There
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# prologic hmm
# prologic :/
# prologic if this requires the original follow's id, I'm screwed :/
# prologic I never stored it in the first place :(
# prologic Do other AP servers behave this way?
# prologic [tantek] I actually hate this about AP :(
# prologic I get so much spam now its not even funny, and my instance doens't follow any of the actors spamming me :(
# prologic I have!
# prologic And I can tell you, websub is way better and easier to work with
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# prologic I've never had any need to store incoming activities in their original form
# prologic if you recall I'm bridging between Twtxt and Activity Pub
# prologic So if this is somehow a weird requirement to "Unfollow an actor" then I'm going to have to rethink the design a bit
# prologic :(
# prologic Hmm
# prologic But you can see a problem here right? In that I currently have actors sending me spam that no-one follows
# prologic This is awful, because it would appear there is no way to undo or block this besides dropping them on the floor
# prologic So you're forever forced to deal with inbound requests against your inbox(s)
# prologic we've talked about this before
# prologic So in the case of other actors sending me stuff I never asked for, there is no way to unfollow them or tell them to stop
# prologic right?
# prologic sqlite> select * from follows;
# prologic [
{"id":"01GT3M27C30S3ZDZXT709WHWMP","created_at":"2023-02-25 06:27:16","updated_at":"2023-02-25 06:27:16","uri":"https://yarn.mills.io/#01GT3M26XKY57YSD50YE7M5S4Q","account_id":"01GT3M273P8R603VQGWX0KYNPE","target_account_id":"01DBA70S0E6CEZ78EJJKCQF69H","show_reblogs":1,"notify":0}]# prologic This is from the GTS sqlite db's follows table
# prologic Yeah sadly I never implemented UnFollow so I'm trying to do that and clean stuff up
# prologic But this is going to be basically impossible now :(
# prologic I'm actually not sure what to do (beyond dropping to the floor) al these other actors that no-one ever followed
# prologic gonna see if I reuse this supposed Follow ID (hard code it just to see) whether that does the trick
# prologic Yup that's the plan
# prologic I'm just going back over this, left it for a few weeks :) And I'm just pointing out how vastly different the whole Activity Pub ecosystem really is, and really how it has flaws that are quite surprising really for me, most notably the behaviour of actors "pushing" you stuff you never asked for
# prologic On this specific point, does this just lead to spam and what I see some smaller Mastodon instances just choose to de-federate because of this?
# prologic Oooh basically have a look at https://twtxt.net/ :)
# prologic I followed one person (actor) and now I get all sorts of other actor's notes too
# prologic I can prove no-one follows them by looking at my user db and seeing if anyone does
# prologic So the good news is that you were right about the Follow ID thing
# prologic Now I'm wondering whether a) I track IDs at all or b) Come up with a content addressable hash for IDs for things like this
# prologic LIke Hash(from+to)
# prologic As the Follow ID
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "ActivityPub spam" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "ActivityPub spam is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[tantek] ActivityPub spam is when your [[ActivityPub]] inbox is sent messages from other ActivityPub servers from accounts that your server never sent a follow activity for.
# prologic [tantek] ++
# prologic Yeah I agree this is a really awful part of the AP protocol for me
# prologic It really makes me not want to do this bridging work at all, but users of Yarn.social do kind of want it (https://twtxt.net/twt/zfjlbcq)
# prologic Yeah I'm not really sure to be honest
# prologic Does the spec/protocol even hint at what servers SHOULD do or MUST do?
# prologic This may be a case of bad implementations :(
# prologic In the case of GTS and the Go libraries that exist, they assume you are using a SQL database to build your AP server :(
# prologic such a poor assumption to make, because it binds you into this sort of crap
# [snarfed] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-undo implies that the original id isn't necessary
# prologic I can't see where it defines this sort of behaviour I'm seeing in GTS
# prologic I agree with you
# prologic In which case GTS's implementation is wrong here
# prologic with a wrong id
# prologic I'm now testing to see what happens if we Refollow and Unfollow
# prologic and see how that behaves
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# prologic good news
# prologic GTS updates the uri if you Unfollow/Refollow
# prologic And using a content-addressable hash for the ID for Follow/UnFollow works nicely
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# prologic Is there more to threading than just setting the inReplyTo field of a note?
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# prologic Hmm I thought I knew how to traverse an actor's outbox for their published/public notes
# prologic But I don't :/
# prologic It seems you just get all the create activites, but no embedded note objects?
# prologic Do I really have to do a network request for each status linked?
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[KevinMarks] Arguably webmention opens you up to that kind of "spam" too - the point of it is to told about actions by people that you don't follow. Are the AP ones likes, reposts and replies to posts that you have sent, or are they other admin stuff?
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# prologic Replies -- I don't support anything else
# prologic Lol
# IWDiscordRelay <capjamesg#4492> 🙃
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# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> prologic: I’m pretty sure GoToSocial uses the go-fed library which is (excruciatingly) neutral on the storage back end. You need to write your own storage for everything, which makes sense because your app is responsible for all the business logic.
# prologic I'm not using go-fed
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> Good. It’s a bear to use. What are you using, then?
# prologic I've basically written my own ap library thats infiniately simpler
# prologic but not ready for public consumption :)
# prologic its very rough around the edges and AP is hard :(
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> I did the same. Also rough for now, but at least my own code is straightforward, yeah? Have you posted your library publicly? I’d love to take a look!
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> [KevinMarks]: In theory, a good block list could prevent WebMention spam just like it would other kids of unwanted messages.
# prologic well it is publicly visible if you want to poke around https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> Cool, thank you! I’m still stuck in the “custom code to federate with everyone’s separate flavors of ActivityPub” stage. So, another baseline of example code will be really helpful!
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> My work is not nearly as far along: https://github.com/EmissarySocial/emissary with ActivotyPub support pulled into a separate module: https://github.com/benpate/hannibal
# prologic your welcome!
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# [snarfed] Eg [aaronpk] syndicates to it, I have https://github.com/snarfed/lexrpc and support in https://granary.io/ , etc. Eventually plan is to add it to https://fed.brid.gy/
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# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> [snarfed]: Yeah. The protocol is is a lot of flux right now, so my plan is to wait and see. It has the big backing, so it seems like a safe bet that BlueSky is going somewhere. Hopefully the Go libraries that they publish will be usable enough without the same kind of custom work we’ve all had to do with ActovityPib.
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> [edit] [snarfed]: Yeah. The protocol is is a lot of flux right now, so my plan is to wait and see. It has the big backing, so it seems like a safe bet that BlueSky is going somewhere. Hopefully the Go libraries that they publish will be usable enough without the same kind of custom work we’ve all had to do with ActivityPib.
# prologic I just would love if it library authors just didn't make so. many assumptions about how users would use their library
# prologic :(
# prologic *phew* fixed several bugs and managed to figure out how to rewrite microformat mentions and convert the incoming HTML from actors into more sensible Markdown which also fixed another bug
# IWDiscordRelay <benpate#1129> [snarfed]: I’m assuming I’ll federate with it, but honestly it’ll take a lot of work to figure out when the time comes. Ideally, you could just host another node on the BlueSky network, install a DID, and go.
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# prologic yeah I'm having to do the same too
# prologic fortunately rewriting mf2 mentions is pretty easy -> https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/commit/288341f71978b1ecadc1e8bc9935f722e652173e/internal/activitypub.go#L31-L35
# prologic using the microformats libraries that do exist (and I use at least one of them) is actually a pain
# prologic I need to maybe one day rewrite a decent mf2 library
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# Loqi 9th anniversary of the launch of Bridgy Publish https://snarfed.org/2014-03-25_bridgy-publish
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[schmarty] 🎉
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# [tw2113_Slack_] I forget who's in charge of https://indieweb.xyz/ but it's got cloudflare issues
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# prologic My efforts last night managed to get threading working much better between Yarn.social dnd Activity Pub 👌 e.g: https://twtxt.net/conv/tqpkjaq
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