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1What if... you had one Fedi account on a generic headless #ActivityPub server that simply hosts and federates your data... and had C2S UIs for microblogging, long form writing, media editing and sharing, link aggregation, games, fitness tracking, and so on, that all used that same Fedi account. Technically, it's a similar concept as ATProto (but no relay and app view) and Solid Pods (but no RDF).
It seems possible... if we can improve the AP C2S API/protocol sufficiently.
@steve If by "sufficiently improve" you mean throwing it away and replacing with a better protocol, then yes it's possible.
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10I can't wait to see what you build! Good luck.
Maybe I am way over my head, but this seems like *exactly* what I am building right now and I'm not really building anything outside of ActivityPub C2S?
I mean... Yes, my current client assumes some specific profile for OAuth and the client will need a proxy to get some data remote servers (to bypass authorized fetch, or to resolve documents from transient activities), but doesn't seem to me that anything I am doing is outside of AP's scope?
@raphael @silverpill @steve I also think that Steve's vision is realisable with ActivityPub API, although I think adding optional features like search, server push and so on makes it easier.
Silverpill does not agree with us. I am wishing Silverpill well in their plan to rebuild with a completely different ground-up API. Silverpill is skilled and smart and very familiar with ActivityPub in great detail, so I'm sure they will come up with some interesting API architecture.
@raphael @silverpill @steve I don't intend to stop working on the ActivityPub API.
There are a lot of us collaborating through the SocialCG ActivityPub API Task Force, and I expect that collaboration to continue:
@evan @raphael @steve I think a generic ActivityPub server can't be built without major changes to ActivityPub. For example, it might be necessary to make all side-effects of activities explicit.
And there is a bigger problem. A generic server without FEP-ef61 is like ATProto PDS or Nostr relay but all data is tied to a single server. This means that it is obsolete before the work has even begun.
@silverpill @evan @raphael Several generic AP server implementations have been built, so I don't know what you mean by the side-effect comment. Note that my mental model of a generic server doesn't implement any domain-specific behaviors in the server, but only side-effects specified by AP (and extended generic C2S support). There are also simpler ways to design servers so that content isn't tied to a specific server (with different tradeoffs than FEP-ef61). That's a long discussion...
@steve @evan @raphael A server can't properly process an arbitrary activity without knowing its side effects. A server that only supports a small number of activities mentioned in the ActivityPub spec is obviously not generic.
I can point to other challenges because I've been working on this problem for years, but...
Several generic AP server implementations have been built
There are also simpler ways to design servers so that content isn't tied to a specific server
Wow, for real? I suppose it's time for me to retire then.
I don't follow: how does that relate to the "ActivityPub API" if the activity is "arbitrary" and not defined by ActivityPub, not using AS2 vocabulary?
Isn't that like saying that we can't use HTTP as a protocol because an HTTP server doesn't know what to do with verbs defined on, e.g, WebDAV?
@silverpill I think you're getting confused about ActivityPub side-effects and application logic side-effects.
I call my project FedBOX a "Generic ActivityPub server" because outside of storing ActivityPub objects and activities to a local storage and dispatching said activities to their recipients it doesn't do anything else.
However there's nothing preventing someone from forking the project and adding some other type of logic to it for specific combinations of Activities/Objects. That's the thing I'm trying to do with my GoActivityPub library: take care of the ActivityPub stuff, so you can then do your own stuff alongside it.
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