Documenting federation behavior in a semi-standard way?

[darius]

You’re absolutely right, I should just be boost/Announce-ing those posts!! I just hadn’t thought of it.

[darius]

Is Event an actor after all? I’ve only ever seen it in the wild in Friendica, and there it’s used as an attachment to a post. I was going to have events myself so representing them in ActivityPub is still an open question. I personally was thinking about a Group with an Event in its attachments . Event isn’t an actor as per the spec, it’s an “object”.

An Event is not an actor in my implementation. I try to be careful in the document about capital-E Event per the spec, versus an “event”, which is the thing that gathio describes. So:

• an Event is an Object that is attached to an Activity and conforms to the AP spec
• an event-the-thing-that-people-attend is an Actor; in this case I am representing it the actor as a Person because I don’t see a better choice (though maybe Service? I’m not sure that most implementations know how to represent that right now)
  • at this juncture I choose to interpret Person as an individual agent, rather than as an “individual person” per the AS Vocab spec

How is this going to work with implementations that deliberately don’t support direct messages, like mine? As of yesterday’s update, I return 400 Bad Request to any Create{Note} that doesn’t contain as:Public in either to or cc .

Great question. I’ll have to think about that. Right now your actors could still follow my actor and get normal public updates. But some correspondence between the human-actor and the event-actor should be private. I think they would simply have to go to the page and manually RSVP rather than doing it via federation.

Also since I was going to have events and the spec specifies the proper way of RSVPing to events ( Invite{Event} and then Accept/Reject/TentativeAccept{Invite} ), are there any plans to support that?

Yes, definitely.

I will add the Accept/Reject/TentativeAccept Invite as a TODO to my list, along with the boosting that nightpool mentioned above.

[darius]

Btw, the above todo items are done, and have been documented in FEDERATION.md

[wakest]

WriteFreely just added federation.md to their repo after I started a question about the behavior of what happens when one changes ones username.

[wakest]

just updating this thread because I came across Zot’s new FEDERATION.md they just added and thought this would be a good place to post it…

[ngerakines]

I added one to tavern and plan on keeping it updated: FEDERATION.md

[grishka]

I made one, too

[dessalines]

@nutomic and I will add one to lemmy once we get some time.

[nutomic]

I have written up something like this for Lemmy

[aschrijver]

Yes, I saw the commit and already updated Guide for new ActivityPub implementers that has a list of impls with a FEDERATION.md (or similar) And I added Smithereen earlier. If anyone else has one, pls update the wiki post.

[silverpill]

I’m thinking about a FEP formalizing FEDERATION.md file. Here’s how it might look like:

# FEP-67ff: FEDERATION.md

## Summary

`FEDERATION.md` is a file containing information necessary for achieving interoperability with a federated service.

## Requirements

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC-2119](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119.html).

## Structure

The `FEDERATION.md` file can have arbitrary structure and content. The only requirements are:

- It MUST be a valid Markdown document.
- It MUST be located in the root of a project's code repository. If project's documentation is located in another place, the `FEDERATION.md` file may contain a link to that location.
- It SHOULD include a list of implemented federation protocols.
- It SHOULD include a list of supported Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEPs).

## Implementations

- [gathio](https://github.com/lowercasename/gathio/blob/a75aad783c117aaef2ec19b6b434be0f0d7e57de/FEDERATION.md)

What do you think?
@darius Since this was your idea, perhaps you will be interested in submitting such proposal?

[snarfed]

This looks like a decentralized version of @gabek 's nascent https://fedidocs.org/ site. Gabe, should we consider making that site fetch and ingest FEDERATION.md files and be a central rendering clearinghouse?

[aschrijver]

@snarfed I suggested this idea in the context of improving grassroots initiative cohesion. The Delightful Club uses a mechanism to aggregate files from different repo’s and build an auto-updating site from that.

PS. I might also point out again the proposal to move FediDocs to the fediverse org on Codeberg where the FEP’s are hosted as well.

[silverpill]

Technically, FEP-67ff: FEDERATION.md is finished, it is a part of my FEP collection: feps/fep-67ff.md at main - feps - Codeberg.org.

Should I submit it to the FEP repo?

[aschrijver]

Yes, it may help encourage the practice. Though FEDERATION.md is up for further improvement… maybe starting with having a template for it, for sake of consistency in documentation. There may be a few more impls. I update Guide for new ActivityPub implementers when I encounter one (but I didn’t revisit to see if they all still exist).

[silverpill]

Template… I like the idea.

Added it to my draft: feps/fep-67ff.md at main - feps - Codeberg.org

[silverpill]

The proposal has been submitted to the FEP repository. Discussion: FEP-67ff: FEDERATION.md

[indieterminacy]

Fwiw, I updated the Lemmy link.

Also, I flagged up that the link for Zot requires updating:

Guide for new ActivityPub implementers

I notice Zap has been moved to a different location in the same forge, Codeberg: This would affect the url pointer in the section on fediverse.md Does anybody know the correct update to provide?

[indieterminacy]

I didnt get anything for this site:
https://fedidocs.org/

Did you mean this instead?:

About Fedi Devs | Fedi Devs

[aschrijver]

Yes, the domain name has changed.