Oliver Lowe

Over the past approx. 100 days, [email protected] has made 2 or 3 public replies. The idea of using any of these social networks over RSS/Atom feeds and plain old websites is that they’re social, not a place you upload text.

As a freedom loving hippie, I’d rather see broadcasters posting to the fediverse instead of whatever awful mish mash of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter et al. it is right now! That would be fantastic!

But as a technical purist, the way DW is using their account right now, they’re arguably no worse off getting links/content from their RSS feeds available to the fediverse somehow (e.g. RSS Parrot). Sometimes I feel like we’ve had walled gardens for so long that we’ve forgotten about interoperability. Lots of platform thinking! Broadcasters don’t need to be on the fediverse, just a way that their stuff can be shared to the fediverse.

I’m excited to see things changing that makes thinking like this even possible!

I’ll upload a video in a bit!

As promised: https://www.olowe.co/tmp/apsubmit.mp4

I’m developing some software to connect ActivityPub and email. It’s been fun and I’ve learned a lot!

I’ll upload a video in a bit!

None that I’m aware of, hoping others can chime in. There’s an open ticket on this in the Mastodon tracker: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18601 Guess that’s something to check every once in a while…

Keep us updated on any findings :)

I’ve updated the docs with new sections Receiving and Reading. See 2.3.1 etc. https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/apas.html

Thanks for your comment as it helped me write down thoughts :)

Right now I follow a few Mastodon users via an RSS-to-Email service, but the problem with that is that you can’t follow private accounts/see followers-only toots. It would be great to have a full email bridge.

Ah yes know exactly what you mean. I follow Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy stuff via RSS too.

I have a little program which follows/unfollows:

apfollow [email protected]
apfollow -u [email protected]

Then things get delivered to my inbox. That’s been working ok. I’m adding a “Following” section to the docs soon.

But I think the main idea is getting Activity into a RFC5322 message in a filesystem. The system doesn’t really care how that file is written. It could be from an ActivityPub server sending stuff to you. But it could also be from reading a RSS feed and fetching the items. My first stab at this was actually a couple of scripts which dumped my Mastodon timeline and some Lemmy stuff to message files.

So if my ActivityPub-email bridge was running you wouldn’t also be able to access a Mastodon UI and for example browse other posts.

What I do now is clunky. First, I’ve written a couple of very basic frontends using both the Lemmmy & Mastodon API. These expose the unique ID of each post, which I copy/paste around…

(like commenting on a random post I was linked to).

I run this command:

apubget -m https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238 > comment.eml

Then open the file in a mail client, and reply to it. Like I said: pretty clunky! :D

One thing I’ve thought about is hijacking the header’s Subject field to hint to apas that we’re replying to something. Modifying Subject is exposed in more mail clients than being able to modify arbitrary fields in the header (ideally we set In-Reply-To). For example for this message I’m writing now:

To: [email protected]
Subject: https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238

Ah yes know exactly what you mean bla bla bla...

Taking it further, frontends could render mailto: links. Here’s one to reply to your message: mailto:[email protected][email protected]&subject=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238

Using Subject as both the name or inReplyTo properties of an Activity depending on its value feels unclear.

Reading RFC 6068, it’s theoretically possible that we could inject a In-Reply-To in a mailto URL. It’s up to the mail application to interpret it. mailto:[email protected][email protected]&in-reply-to=%3Chttps%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238%3E This encodes the message:

To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
In-Reply-To: <https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238>

bla bla bla

Just tested and found that MailMate actually handles this. Still feels unclear… I dunno. What do you think?

Lemmy’s maintainers seem overworked. As is the case with so much of software dev, (open source or otherwise!) non-programmers are unaware of or underestimate maintenance burden. From the outside, it looks like it’s just about “adding a feature”. But in reality, it’s less about “adding” and more about “growing”. Feature requests generally need to be evaluated with this in mind; whether future development is sustainable with some new feature(s).

I see opportunities here for some software dealing with either ActivityPub directly or with Lemmy’s HTTP API.

Anyone used lemmy-modder? Thoughts?

Oh huh. Good spotting.

After some quick digging… seems like a bug in the Lemmy web UI. I think= it’s assuming the timestamp is always UTC. Are you using the UI at https= ://lemmy.blahaj.zone ?

The timestamp of the source message is has the UTC+11 timezone (where I a= m): https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/otl/outbox/1709878623152651007 And I no= tice that in the old-Reddit-like interface at https://old.lemmy.world/com= ment/8236475 it renders as a time in the past.

So this comment I am writing is going to appear as an email in a chain? Neat!

Yep, that’s what it looks like at my end!