My friend is working on adding ActivityPub support to his blog platform (BDServer) so people can follow/comment from Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.

Current status: Lemmy and Misskey can find and follow his account (@blenderdumbass@blenderdumbass.org), but Mastodon can’t find it at all, even though he sees proper ActivityPub requests hitting his server.

The technical details are pretty gnarly - RSA signature verification, HTTP header recreation, multi-threading issues. He wrote up the full journey here: Please Help Me With Activity Pub

If anyone has ActivityPub experience or wants to take a look at the code (Python), we have a Matrix room for BDServer development. Any insights on why different platforms behave differently would be super helpful.

https://matrix.to/#/#bdserver:tchncs.de

Source code: ActivityPub.py

  • Blender DumbassEnglish
    2•11 days ago

    Seems like somebody mentioned the account on the fediverse that started a chain reaction of various instances requesting a bunch of stuff. Which made it to Mastodon.social too. It still doesn’t work though.

    The server is written in python and the idea is to make it deploy-able without needing to install anything extra. So I’m trying to implement my own activity pub.

    • irelephant [he/him]English
      0•11 days ago

      Running curl https://blenderdumbass.org/activitypub/account/blenderdumbass -H "Accept: application/activity+json" twice in a row outputs some bunkerweb anti-spam stuff.