mikka in markdown

Write.as has “some” support for ActivityPub. Meaning, it’s got the “Pub” part of PubSub partially right. Indeed, Fedizen can subscribe to write.as blogs like this one (using the not very obvious @mikka@blog.mikka.md in this case).

That’s where some of the issues start. This one has nothing to do with write.as but the general assholery that is Mastodon and some bugs in Misskey. This is how Misskey treats an ActivityPub Note from write.as:

Mastodon simply provides a link to the original article. That is now how the fediverse and ActivityPub are supposed to work. You’re supposed to be able to read the full article on your home instance, comment, like, reshare, etc.

And this is Misskey. While it does show all of the Note, it does insert mad amounts of line breaks (br) as a substitute for a single or double CR-LF. Also not ideal. And proof that neither care much about the Fediverse per se and are trying to shoehorn a Content PubSub into their own “social media” network.

That’s on the remote side though. Locally not all is well, either.

The Fediverse is, as stated, PubSub. Meaning:

1. I can subscribe to any content available on any server offering ActivityPub. It does not matter if that server is a calender server, a blog server, a chat server, a picture server, a video server, or a Quora or LinkedIn like server.
2. I can then comment, like, or reshare this content if I want to. I do this right on my instance, not the remote instance the content originated from. My instance sends a “someone commented/liked/reshared” notification to the original content, and my comment/like/reshare shows up there as well.
3. I can create my own content, depending on the server. A picture on a picture server, a video on a video server, a blog post on a blog server and so on…
4. Others can subscribe to this content and comment/like/reshare locally on their instances, sending me a notification.

Well, write.as would only have to implement the latter two. It doesn’t. It implements number three, “create my own content.”

It does not implement #4 at all, and even the much-hailed (by write.as) remark.as doesn’t. More to the (bad) point, remark.as seems to require an active account on write.as to comment, which defeats all the ideals of the federated web, whose biggest goal is to allow anyone to participate in any conversation without having to maintain more than their local, home instance, presence on the net.

So I am back to Square Zero. It looks more and more as if my best and only approach is Simon Willison’s 2018 suggestion:

There are deep issues with ActivityPub, not the least of which is the usurping of the Fediverse by Mastodon and its API. As @loweel@bbs.keinpfusch.net writes about Mastodon actively making its API and implementation hard to understand:

Because, again, if this happens, the monopoly of Mastodon (or at least, let's call it “incumbent”) would end, if almost everybody was in the condition to create something similar. So the Mastodon API are documented in a way which requires a shit load of man-days to understand and implement. The harder as possibile.

Solution? Setup a WordPress server. Make it speak ActivityPub (@pfefferle@mastodon.social did an amazing job with his plugin), have a decent RSS/Atom feed for subscriptions (Misskey users can add that to their account, even), send out Pingback/Trackback whenever needed? Back to 2004? Back to the roots, which worked and worked well?

…

I don’t know what to do at this point. After four years of semi-ActivityPub on write.as it seems as if there’s little to no interest to make this a feature complete service. WordPress, on the other hand, is PHP and MariaDB, which I neither speak well nor want to, and which is hard to optimize and/or debug if you’re not a computer person but a flesh and bone repair man one and don’t have the time.
In 29 days I’ll be in the Spanish high desert. I’d like to have all this done by then. Let’s see what I come up with.