New blog post: How to implement a basic ActivityPub server https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/
@Gargron Very good idea. That was really missing ("Hello, world" in Activity Pub).
@Gargron One suggestion for the next one: a link between the things you say and the relevant part of the official ActivityPub spec. You say several things where I cannot find the matching text in the spec. (Specially about authentication and signatures.)
@bortzmeyer They're not in the spec! The spec left them "up to the implementation"
@Gargron This is what I thought but I told myself "No, it cannot be so wrong, I have probably overlooked something"
@bortzmeyer It's both bad and good. Lack of directions for transport and authentication layers means ActivityPub could be used over udp or websockets. Of course that's little use to us, since those layers being incompatible would cut us off.
@Gargron Protocols with a lot of knobs to turn typically fail, because of the lack of interoperability. Unless there is a "reference implementation" which becomes some sort of "de facto standard".
@bortzmeyer That's us!
@Gargron Which means ActivityPub is indeed a failure (but Mastodon is not, otherwise, we couldn't have this discussion)?
In that case, why using ActivityPub at all?
@bortzmeyer @Gargron mastodon hasn't complied to the spec in the past
@bortzmeyer @saxnot That, and the fact I literally was part of the AP design sessions, why would I violate the spec with my implementation if my implementation literally shaped the spec. The lie originates from the OStatus days, and even then it wasn't true, GNU social wasn't 100% compliant with the written specs and I refused to repeat those mistakes.
@saxnot @bortzmeyer That's a lieeeee