What have I done?! My abomination of an idea of bridging my email and ActivityPub progresses. If you see this message, something is working! Comments replies are welcome as it’s a good test of this system :)
People keep saying ActivityPub is a lot like email. If it’s so similar to email, could I use my email client to interact with the fediverse?
Previously I did this by writing a SMTP interface to the Mastodon HTTP API. That worked. But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it’s really ActivityPub. The real deal would be working with ActivityPub directly, not the Mastodon HTTP API.
And that’s now (mostly?) working! In shonky diagram form, sending looks like this:
laptop --SMTP--> my_server --ActivityPub--> fediverse
Replies look like this:
fediverse --ActivityPub--> my_server --SMTP--> mailbox <--IMAP-- laptop
my_server translates back and forth between ActivityPub messages and
mail messages.
For example given the message:
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2024 16:37:59 +1100
From: Oliver Lowe <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: test 2
test hello world!
The following ActivityPub message is created:
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"id":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/outbox/1709703480070628170",
"type":"Note",
"name":"test 2",
"to": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting","https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],
"cc": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting"],
"published":"2024-03-06T16:37:59+11:00",
"attributedTo":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/actor.json",
"content":"test hello world!",
"mediaType":"text/markdown"
}
There’s still a lot of bugs (of course) and unimplemented bits (of course). I can’t call this a proper fediverse service yet. I’m going to roll with this for a bit and see how it holds up.
Dude was so preoccupied about whether he could, that he never stopped to think whether he should.
Oh I stopped and thought whether I should. The answer was “probably not” every time…
Looks like a really fun project and honestly, this looks like the future of mailinglists (fuck mailinglists). Do keep working on it. I’d much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.
👏
I’d much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.
Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?
Darn it, you got me. I hadn’t thought about it more deeply, but now I’ll give it a few minutes.
So yeah, a lemmy UI to LKML would make the experience much better. Obviously the LKML serves two purposes: discussion and code review, for which the latter lemmy probably isn’t too well equipped, but it would help make it more approachable.
Probably to make it work there’d need to be some kind of listener. I imagine signing up to a mailinglist with an email address of the domain running your software would suffice. Incoming emails would then be converted to activitypub messages and sent to the lemmy server you control.
You’d have two classes of email addressed: list email addresses which map to lemmy communities and user email addresses which map to users on the lemmy server (which could also be remote users in the fediverse). The list email addresses are there to create posts in the lemmy community and populate existing lemmy posts (created in the mailinglist) with responses from the mailinglist (response = comment).
A user on lemmy on lemmy commenting on a post from a mailinglist would be automatically signed up to the mailinglist with a user email address that’s dynamically created (I think your email has to be signed up otherwise the mailinglist rejects it). Upon successful signup, the response would be sent using their email address to the maillinglist thread.
The other way around, a comment would show up on lemmy with email address and username of the person that responded on the mailinglist.
(10 minutes later) After writing it out, I’m not sure it’s what you’re doing and more like a bridge, but maybe it’ll inspire you. Who knows. There’s probably something I’m missing and probably this isn’t even what your intention was when you started out with this.
Anyway, do your thing dude and have fun!
Hey mate thanks for writing all that down. Gives me a few ideas - in particular how NNTP could fit in to the equation.
LKML can be accessed by a usenet client at nntp.lore.kernel.org. In theory, then, it should be possible to at least read both LKML and ActivityPub stuff hosted at the same NNTP server. To get that working means making sure all the conversion and mapping of concepts are as clean as possible. It’s a good test!
Thanks again!
So this comment I am writing is going to appear as an email in a chain? Neat!
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!
This comment has a timestamp in the future. It says “in 8 hours” for me.
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.
It’s only on the blahaj.zone web UI. Lemmy.world has a newer version.
The ghost of Lemmy Kilmister graces ur presence! 🎸🎤
Forward this to at least 3 of ur friends and you will have ur wish granted! 🤩
- 3 friends - ur wish granted in 5 years🌟⭐
- 5 friends - in 3 years
- 10 friends - in 1 year
- 20 friends - in 6 months
- 30 friends - in 3 months
- 50 friends - in 1 month
- 100 friends - TOMORROW! 🌠🌠🌠
But be careful, if you don’t pass on the good luck, Lemmy’s ghost will HAUNT you in 3 days!!! 👻😱😱 Hurry!
[The only thing missing is random colours of text]
Cool, now do it over Ping!
Don’t tempt me :D
This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet? It’s basically a shared inbox thats whole intent is threaded conversation. Sound familiar?
Is Usenet opensource?
It’s a protocol, made with open RFC docs.
TIL. Always thought it was software.
This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet?
Yes that’s on the list! Now that I have a whole bunch of RFC822 files, (in Maildirs) I can also serve them over read-only NNTP. This was the original goal actually - I like the idea of using the simpler protocol NNTP over IMAP to read stuff.
Brilliant, who needs new fancy apps when you have email clients
Tell Google to give us back our RSS feeds too, they stole em
Then there’s the irc client bridge to think about, posts could be channels and you reply in em
And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an executive summary of your memes for the day
RSS is not gone - you can read RSS by mail and it’s quite awesome. Check RSS2Email or Nachrichtensortiermaschine
And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an executive summary of your memes for the day
needs more crypto
removed by mod
UNSUBSCRIBE
;)
Error 404, sorry that link doesn’t seem to be working right now, please try again later.
404 - erections not working
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Bad bot.
removed by mod
I guess the mods didn’t find this very funny, since they nuked it. Disappointing, because I was able to read it through the magic of caching and it made me crack up laughing
UNSUBSCRIBE
;)
This is cool. Keep working on it.
Hmmm 🙃
📧📧📧
Hello from Lemmy!
This is an excellent idea. It’s gateways like this that will continue to offer options that are not available on other platforms.
Look forward to seeing how this evolves!
You’re weird. I like you.
But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it’s really ActivityPub.
It’s not though! Fediverse = federated universe, and encompasses all federate platforms. I learned this recently myself also.
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