Discussing the evolution of the activitypub.rocks site

Following the recent APConf in Prague, I tried going through the resources at hand for new ActivityPub implementers, reviewing what we could improve to ease the onboarding. activitypub.rocks plays a major role in this, being the main landing page for the protocol.

In the meantime, this forum has been created and made public. It could play a major role at organizing the information long-term for varied audiences, but would not replace ap.rocks as a landing page, which means we have to properly link to the relevant parts of the forum for ap.rocks.

Now, I would normally suggest the modifications through a PR directly against the code, but I was unable to run the site code. Moreover, the 28-09 SocialCG meeting lead me to write down my suggestions here instead before deciding anything:

  • a top bar featuring the main links, so as make the most important information stand out:
    • a link to the spec
    • a link to the forum
    • a link to (a) future guide(s) aimed at implemeters? That could also be done in the “Implementers” section below, but having twice the information doesn’t hurt.
  • same thing but for end users that might bump on ActivityPub before some more user-oriented project page like https://joinmastodon.org/ or the future https://joinfediverse.org.
  • a rewritten “implementers” section that points to the relevant forum sections rather than the defunct test.activitypub.rocks.
  • a visible rss feed button in the news section
  • a rewritten news section, that includes not just the blog but also selected videos from the past AP events that present the project well

I made a demonstration at https://rigelk.gitlab.io/activitypub.rocks/ that I initially meant as a full rewrite of ap.rocks to be more hackable, including a replication of the implementation reports page. Its code is available at https://gitlab.com/rigelk/activitypub.rocks.


Questions: do you find the suggested modifications to the site valuable? Do you have other modifications in mind? Would you favor a re-implementation of the site in something more easily hackable?


an issue was created on the dustycloud/activitpub.rocks tracker: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/issues/11 and a mirror issue on the w3c/activipub tracker: https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/345
this issue incidentally tries to achieve part of what https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/335 diagnosed, and follows-up on https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/331

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a top bar featuring the main links, so as make the most important information stand out:

completely agree

same thing but for end users that might bump on ActivityPub before some more user-oriented project page like https://joinmastodon.org/ or the future https://joinfediverse.org.

Interesting but it may be a challenging problem for us; there are some tough governance decisions on “who gets to be on the list?” I think I, at least, don’t have the energy to be able to accomodate the amount of work to do that responsibly? But we could at least do something that gives people a better list of well acknowledged implementations.

a rewritten “implementers” section that points to the relevant forum sections rather than the defunct test.activitypub.rocks.

For that matter, we might as well discuss “what to do about the test suite”, but this should be its own thread

a visible rss feed button in the news section

Sure, that’s easy

a rewritten news section, that includes not just the blog but also selected videos from the past AP events that present the project well

Hm, good idea. I’m also willing to accept more contributors on blogposts; it’s perfectly feasible to submit new blogposts as markdown.

I’m willing to make some changes, but let’s discuss a little bit more here.

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It doesn’t have to be hardcoded in the site. Just redirect to the software section of the forum (at least it would stay consistent with our forum moderation)? Or a list of lists? But having a list of software isn’t the most important point. It could be at least explaining the implications of the technology for the end-user, and what kind of software the user can find, in broad categories.

This might be a bit of a tangent, but what’s the plan for https://joinfediverse.org ? From the label on the tin it sounds a bit like what we’ve been trying to do with fediverse.party

I am not responsible of the project, I just know some people involved.

While the goals of the two projects sound similar, joinfediverse is meant as a landing page explaining concepts involved in the fediverse and what to expect from major implementations. The end goal is to be able to share the site with your family and friends without the need for any other explanation. Beyond that, I don’t know more.

This is pretty much exactly the goals of fediverse.party. Maybe there’s sufficient points of difference that it’s worth having two sites with this goal, but even if that’s the case, we would definitely like to collaborate. Is anyone from joinfediverse.org present on the Fediversity board on this forum? It was set up to discuss collaboration on these kinds of projects.

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@rigelk @strypey We quickly discussed the site at the Social CG Telcon.
Have you seen the guide Chris wrote afterwards ?

Thanks for pointing me to it :slight_smile: I won’t be available for any new projects until after FOSSasia in March. At this point I’m more flagging that some overlap in goals might exist and suggesting a chat with Light about it, who is Gold Leader at fediverse.party about collaboration and/or differentiation. Also inviting you to open a thread about the project in the Fediversity category so various other heads working on similar user support projects can chime in.

I’d like this link to be called “SocialHub” (with maybe a title attribute saying “The ActivityPub Community Forum”) so the name sticks. I think this was an excellent move from @mxb to name the original forum this way.

I guess #fediversity can be a good help in this case for “[u]nderstanding and discovering communities on this emerging social network that is the Fediverse”. As it comprises fediverse.space, fediverse.network and switching.software[1], it offers a ready portal to all the implementations one would ever need to educate themselves.

Also, I’d move the implementers section below the news (actually, just above the footer) since this section will hardly change.

I’m fine with using Haunt if indeed we can have a clear path to make something beautiful without too much headache. As long as it supports plain Markdown (preferrably CommonMark) input, I’m good :slight_smile:


  1. and more Fediverse resources

    Fediverse.Network has this list:

    ↩︎

It does support that!

I’d also like to mention Federated Diversity Foundation, which I’ve drafted, as having a possible role here. The source code sits under the same Fediverse organization where we also intend to move the #activitypub:fep repository.

See also: Presenting Fedi Foundation: Empowerment for SocialHub community