What have I done?! My abomination of an idea of bridging my email and ActivityPub progresses. If you see this message, something is working! Comments replies are welcome as it's a good test of this system :) People keep saying ActivityPub is a lot like email. If it's so similar to email, could I use my email client to interact with the fediverse? Previously I did this by writing a SMTP interface to the Mastodon HTTP API. That worked. But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it's really ActivityPub. The real deal would be working with ActivityPub directly, not the Mastodon HTTP API. And that's now (mostly?) working! In shonky diagram form, sending looks like this: laptop --SMTP--> my_server --ActivityPub--> fediverse Replies look like this: fediverse --ActivityPub--> my_server --SMTP--> mailbox <--IMAP-- laptop my_server translates back and forth between ActivityPub messages and mail messages. For example given the message: Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2024 16:37:59 +1100 From: Oliver Lowe To: localtesting@aussie.zone Subject: test 2 test hello world! The following ActivityPub message is created: { "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "id":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/outbox/1709703480070628170", "type":"Note", "name":"test 2", "to": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting","https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"], "cc": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting"], "published":"2024-03-06T16:37:59+11:00", "attributedTo":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/actor.json", "content":"test hello world!", "mediaType":"text/markdown" } There's still a lot of bugs (of course) and unimplemented bits (of course). I can't call this a proper fediverse service yet. I'm going to roll with this for a bit and see how it holds up.
But if you can keep spamming our (heh) a new site for like 99c a domain name, you could do this a lot despite getting banned.
The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but that really harms the ability for new sites to appear.