A case of spec ambiguity, maybe? I can't find a mention in WebFinger or ActivityPub specs of usernames being case insensitive. Are @osma and @osma referring to the same actor? Is that up to implementation? How does a remote server determine which is correct?
Edit: I wrote above (at)[email protected] and (at)[email protected], but some part of the stack converted both to a lowercase mention during posting. I don't know which part, and what specs describes that.
To my knowledge there are no specifications for this. It's left completely to the implementation. Some projects have case-sensitive usernames and some do not. Some provide case-insensitive search and some do not. As a general rule, you'll often avoid issues if you use whatever form was used by the source of the information that you got it from.
@mikedev
Yep. I only ran into this when my server received messages with mixed conventions... Didn't have a unique lowercase index on the actors, so ended up having two records for the "same" one -- for informal understandings of sameness.
I should take a break from whining about #ActivityPub to crow about my big breakthrough. Today, I successfully sent my first messages and replies between #Emissary and #Mastodon. And all it required was a complete overhaul the custom ActivityPub outbox.
It’s a small step forward, but a huge milestone for me. Hopefully, it will translate to big wins for other devs who can use my #Golang libraries in the future.
Every now and then, technologists are able to translate their strongly held beliefs into action for the benefit of society. Sometimes these actions result in new features, apps or platforms but it's especially powerful when this happens at the protocol level.
In the latest episode of Dot Social I talk with @evan about how he helped get #ActivityPub started, how it's going, and what he hopes for next. Check it out here.
A new episode of Dot Social, the first podcast about the open social web, is out! In it, Flipboard CEO @mike chats with ActivityPub co-author @evan about what the protocol unlocks for builders and entrepreneurs, how open-source social networks change our relationships to content and each other, and why any of this matters at all. Learn more and take a listen!
I'm thinking I might stop using the term #fediverse#fedi or #activitypub when I want to talk about this community of federated social media services.
It's confusing and to be honest sounds way too much like a corporate brand trying to sell something.
I'm thinking I might start using something like "open internet" in general and "open social media" in particular to make the point that fedi isn't some specific thing; it's the default social media for the open internet.
I admit that it might be a bit of a "lies to children" (Pratchett et al), but it might be the first steps to carefully lead people away and towards a place where that brighter and wider future is visible.
I am using another term #Peopleverse, but not with intent for that to be a real name. More a vision for an online landscape that seamlessly aligns with our offline world and is in support of our daily lives.
Our CEO, @mike just launched a new podcast series titled "Dot Social" to explore the evolution of the internet and how new open standards, like #ActivityPub, can forever change the web and the world of social media.
From Meta's engineering blog. At least they continue to talk explicitly about #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. However, no mention of the EU launch.
> „Our goal with #Threads is to make social content as interoperable as email. We are working on the ability for Threads to integrate with ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol.“
"Joining #ActivityPub would have been a big engineering effort, but federation could have brought in enough interesting content to make sticking around be worth it."
I don’t think pitching #ActivityPub to existing social media makes sense. Adding federation to a non-federated social media service isn’t a net win.
You have to spend the time and money to implement it. Then you have to spend the time and money to maintain it. Most of the time, ActivityPub support is implemented as mastodon compatibility, not true AP support. This means having to constantly make sure you keep up with masto changes and constantly fielding issues with other implementations because you didn’t fully implement AP.
And after implementation, you don’t just gain access to a ton of new users, you have to take on the burden of moderating all of it (which is a persistent ant recurring time and money cost). And since the #fediverse has a ton of opinions on moderation, you’re always pissing somebody off.
And after all that, what you’ve enabled is an easy way for your users to recreate their social graph without your service. The idea of an interconnected social web is cool, and hopefully it’ll be the futrue, but it doesn’t make sense for profit-driven businesses.