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.

  • Oliver Lowe@apubtest2.srcbeat.comOP
    2·
    10 months ago

    The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but that really harms the ability for new sites to appear.

    If something like this were to gain lots of traction I’d hope it would be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites.

    What really sucks is the situation with email now: it’s really tricky to get stuff delivered if you’re not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to entry is way, way too high :(