[HN Gopher] Creating your own federated microblog
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Creating your own federated microblog
Author : dahlia
Score : 148 points
Date : 2025-04-24 09:37 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fedify.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (fedify.dev)
| _heimdall wrote:
| I've never quite understood the appeal of ActivityPub.
|
| Looking at the list of goals in the article, the only benefit in
| addition to what can easily be done with RSS is knowing who
| follows me. Maybe its just me, but if I'm writing to a blog or a
| microblog I just don't really care who follows me or even who
| reads it.
|
| There are more social features built into ActivityPub, likes and
| shares for example, but at that point I'm likely not running my
| own server and am trusting a third party to do it for me. The
| idea that there are multiple hosts I can choose to trust rather
| than one centralized one feels more like a principled argument
| than one based on real benefits of, for example, owning my own
| content or censorship resistance.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| I used to think running my own server for blog stuff was a
| waste as well. But it's incredible what can be done with local
| mini server running Ubuntu and cloud flare tunnels.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Sure, I have a small homelab and use Tailscale for a similar
| setup to CF tunnels.
|
| That's a bit besides the point though. I'm not saying hosting
| ActivityPub yourself seems unnecessary, I'm saying that
| ActivityPub itself seems unnecessary (or at least not worth
| the costs and overhead).
| gessha wrote:
| With the rising VPS costs I'm starting to wonder if it's
| better to move my VPS in-house(:D). Electricity-wise I might
| be break-even but I wonder if the bandwidth I get from my ISP
| will be the same, not that my services are high-traffic
| anyway.
| rglullis wrote:
| > if I'm writing to a blog or a microblog I just don't really
| care who follows me or even who reads it.
|
| - if you want to have comments or backtracks, you can do it
| with ActivityPub without having people signing up to your site
| (directly or through some OAuth system)
|
| - If you want to mitigate spam, you can set up your AP blog to
| only accept messages on the inbox from actors who you
| whitelist.
|
| - You could have your own Substack where you only send the
| updates to actors who are paying subscribers.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The OP here specifically wasn't including any auth features,
| which I was pretty sure would mean backtracks and comments
| aren't supported but maybe that's wring. It is possible with
| ActivityPub, but I'd personally be hesitant to run my own
| OAuth server just for a microblog.
|
| Regardless, my underlying point really is about what I expect
| of a microblog. If I'm hosting it myself I just want it to be
| my little corner of the internet, not a full fledged social
| media site that I have to maintain. That doesn't mean I'm
| right or that others don't expect more.
| rglullis wrote:
| > If I'm hosting it myself I just want it to be my little
| corner of the internet, not a full fledged social media
| site that I have to maintain.
|
| I think the problem is that OP is focused on developing a
| framework for AP, and he is dogfooding it by developing an
| application that other people can understand without too
| many new concepts.
|
| This is good if you want people to get experiments, but it
| is terrible as a way to present the true potential of the
| protocol: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/113143389340566731
| apitman wrote:
| > if you want to have comments or backtracks, you can do it
| with ActivityPub without having people signing up to your
| site (directly or through some OAuth system)
|
| You can do the same thing with RSS+We mention, which is a way
| simpler stack and predates ActivityPub by years
| rglullis wrote:
| Webmentions are a spammer's wet dream. There is a reason
| they were adopted only by the Indieweb crowd.
|
| Anyway, my point was less "ActivityPub can do everything
| people can do with RSS" and more "having a mechanism to for
| bidirectional _authenticated_ messages opens up the
| possibility of new applications ".
|
| The real interesting part will happen when/if more
| developers realize that ActivityPub can do more than
| "federated versions of popular social media platforms".
| apitman wrote:
| I might be misunderstanding what you're saying here. How
| is ActivityPub more authenticated than Webmention? WM
| requires the poster to host their content on a website.
| This is exactly what the AP spec says to do. Now, since
| the spec was published, most AP implementations also
| support HTTP signatures[0], but this doesn't provide
| additional guarantees that you can't get with WM. The
| authentication is still tied to a URL.
|
| As far as spamming goes, I don't see how WM is any worse
| than AP. In both protocols your only options are
| passlists and/or blocklists.
|
| [0]: And an old version that doesn't have an official
| spec. ActivityPub's issues with spec stagnation and de
| facto standards is a whole other thing.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I haven't dug into these, so apologies for the naive
| question, but for a multi-tenant service like
| WordPress.com, can you effectively limit which WordPress
| blogs can WebMention you? If the allowlist is formed on
| the domain, this seems limiting.
|
| Perhaps more advanced URL regex can achieve more fine-
| grained control but I do still see advantages in pubkey
| auth (especially if people want to move their content.)
|
| Still, I do find myself wishing for a lighterweight-than-
| ActivityPub middleground.
| apitman wrote:
| You're right, in default configurations ActivityPub
| definitely has an advantage here, since HTTPsigs are tied
| to users, not instances, which gives finer grained
| blocking. I'm not aware of anything like this for
| Webmention.
|
| I suspect this is because WM is used far less than AP. It
| also grew out of a community (IndieWeb) where having your
| own domain is a core tenet.
|
| I think something like Mastodon could work with WM
| though, since all URLs hang off of user URLs, so you
| could block by URL prefix, ie "block
| https://example.com/user1/*".
| candiddevmike wrote:
| ATProto may be more beneficial to integrate, Bluesky seems more
| active than Mastodon... For blogging, there's WhiteWind:
|
| https://whtwnd.com/
| h4kor wrote:
| I've added ActivityPub to my blog system
| (https://h4kor.github.io/owl-blogs/) as just another way of
| subscribing to the blog, but found that it is a good model to
| support interactions.
| rpgbr wrote:
| The appeal, at least for me, is having a social layer on top of
| your own stuff. Are you familiar with POSSE (Publish (on your)
| Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)? With AP you skip the whole
| second part because it's automatically syndicated everywhere
| the moment you post on your own site.
|
| I'm having good results with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin
| on my blog[1].
|
| [1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/
| patrickdavey wrote:
| Is this [1] the actual plugin you're using?
|
| [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
| vhcr wrote:
| I hate that the conversation online has moved from distributed
| to federated, I understand that running p2p software is harder
| for the user, but I feel like actually distributed
| microblogging / social networks are the right choice going
| forwards.
| zamalek wrote:
| Not even microblogging, jut blogging in general. ActivityPub
| _could_ be a replacement for RSS readers. I consider a
| platform that allows you to mix microblogs, blogs, podcasts,
| videos, and livestreams /events the "endgame" - all of which
| can be done with ActivityPub (albeit with different projects
| today). Unfortunately this is not the type of project that I
| would find interesting at all to write.
| smjburton wrote:
| > To simplify the tutorial, we'll impose the following feature
| constraints:
|
| > There is no search functionality.
|
| This makes sense for the tutorial, but search functionality would
| be awesome for discovery, both in terms of people finding your
| blog as well as finding other interesting blogs to follow. Niche
| blogs seem more difficult to find these days when Google only
| seems to surface websites with the right keywords.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Google offers Programmable Search Engine [0], a service where
| you can create site-specific search box. That's probably good
| enough for most small personal websites.
|
| [0] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/
| smjburton wrote:
| This is interesting, thanks for sharing.
| saltysalt wrote:
| I miss RSS.
| marcusb wrote:
| It's still around
| quantadev wrote:
| RSS is around, but Google successfully relegated it to a
| grave yard, when they stopped supporting it in a big way. RSS
| is such a simple and powerful thing, it's a shame it's almost
| nonexistant. Even ActivityPub should've been "built around
| and on top of RSS" rather than as a separate thing. Same is
| true of Nostr. Nostr could've been an extension to RSS and
| let RSS be the least operative fallback for the entire
| protocol, but yet the format for all delivery nonetheless.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Completely agree! We already had a perfectly good protocol
| for content federation.
| saltysalt wrote:
| I've hosted an RSS feed on my blog for 20 years, in the vain
| hope that it is still being consumed by someone.
|
| I think the only use case keeping RSS alive is podcast feeds.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| One of my issues with ActivityPub is that there is no such thing
| as a cut-down completely static AP feed for blogs. I want
| Mastodon users to be able to follow my static blog but I don't
| want to implement the machinery to have full interactivity.
|
| Basically an RSS bridge would work fine. I know such things
| already exist but it would be cool if it was built into AP.
|
| Right now I just manually post my blog post to my Mastodon
| account which is perfectly fine.
| rglullis wrote:
| This is an issue with Mastodon (and most of other software that
| implements only the push-based processing of inbox), but there
| is nothing on ActivityPub that prevents a client to directly
| read the actor's outbox.
|
| As a matter of fact, I am working on a fork of a elk right now
| that is meant to function as a _pull_ -based reader of AP data,
| so pretty soon you will be able to have your SSG generate an
| outbox for you and I would get all updates, boost it, etc
| apitman wrote:
| ActivityPub can be implemented as static files. You do end up
| with a lot of duplication because activities contain objects,
| and you need separate URLs for each.
| 1dom wrote:
| This is really useful, thanks.
|
| I've recently been playing around selfhosting a small single user
| activitypub server to see how it works. I can't understate how
| satisfying it's been to wallow in compared to a static site or
| serverless setup. It unexpectedly tickled that special "oooh, a
| _system_" part of my brain, a lot.
| jskherman wrote:
| On a related note, see Hollo: https://github.com/fedify-dev/hollo
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