Actor domains

ActivityPub
1

I’ve been looking over the different specs and implementations to find an answer to this question: Is it acceptable to “host” an actor and their collections on a different domain?

Consider the domain foo.com with a webfinger endpoint at foo.com/.well-known/webfinger and an actor with the address nick@foo.com. When the request is made to foo.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:nick@foo.com, the response would return an actor id of sub.foo.com/users/nick.

In this example, the top level domain wouldn’t have any functional activitypub resources. Practically, the subdomain sub.foo.com is the activitypub service, but the goal is to represent actors (users) with the bare domain.

2

Not exactly sure but it sounds like what mastodon is allowing for quite a long time…

Poke @nightpool

3

Yeah, this should be fine. The /.well-known/webfinger needs to be resolvable at whatever hostname you want for your webfinger address. The actual ActivityPub resource can live elsewhere.

4

Great, thanks. With Tavern, I’m making a distinction between service host domain and actor domain. This would allow requests the webfinger endpoint to be proxied and local actors be referenced as @{actor}@{actor domain} while residing on https://{service host domain}/users/{actor}.

The end goal is to make it easier for sites to have their core user site and then subdomains for things like tavern, discourse, etc.