Oliver Lowe @ otl @apubtest2.srcbeat.com

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1 yr. ago

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!

Haha yeah it is, but I can't quite put my finger on why.

Huh wow. Super interesting. Probably a dumb question: could you use it for video, like motion jpeg (or MJPEG or however it's named)?

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 :)

Wow, and you only started programming in October?! Nice work!

Interesting format. Wonder what applications make use of it.

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 kevincox@lemmy.ml
    apfollow -u kevincox@lemmy.ml


  

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: kevincox@lemmy.ml
    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:kevincox@lemmy.ml?cc=fediverse@lemmy.world&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:kevincox@lemmy.ml?cc=fediverse@lemmy.world&in-reply-to=%3Chttps%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238%3E This encodes the message:

        To: kevincox@lemmy.ml
    CC: fediverse@lemmy.world
    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?

Nice work!

I love this easy candid style. It's not trying to push anything, for instance "8 years of meetups - how you can do the same!", or "8 years of meetups - why everything sucks".

It's a blog in that kinda old-school sense. A web log of some stuff that happened to somebody personally. So much stuff published as "blogs" are more like essays (ignoring all the shitty marketing blogs). I like essays too, but I also really like these life log things. Not sure how to find one over the other.

Thanks for sharing. I didn't expect to be inspired...!

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?

From my experience, it didn't taste so nice. And the flies were still there afterwards.

From my experience, it didn't taste so nice. And the flies were still there afterwards.

Do you grow chillies?

The other day an Italian couple gave me a jar full of home grown chillis in olive oil because I fixed their satellite tv service

Ah oops sorry! Either way thanks for the invite :)

Interesting, thanks for putting the time in! I love awk and its Unix roots.

This question might not make any sense but I'm curious! What are some of your favourite languages based on their EBNF grammar alone?

Greetings from Sydney. Hope weather is OK. @CEOofmyhouse56 said I was welcome to say g'day here. I thought to myself, oh I dunno... But then he said:

We just talk shit here.

that's my kinda place

Just testing some proof-of-concept software for fediverse things so good to test it in a real thread

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!