Understanding ActivityPub and Federation (mastodon.social)

submitted 1 year ago by JustusWingert@mastodon.social to c/programming@beehaw.org

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Understanding ActivityPub and Federation

I have tried to understand how Federation works but I'm getting a feeling that there's some rather large gaps here. My first attempt was to find an API implementation in python, 3 wasted hours of my life later and I'm making requests.request() calls like it's 2007. And I still can't access the content as presented on the webinterfaces. There doesn't seem to be a way to access eg the communities tab via activitypub? Any Help?

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[-] nmtake@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

There doesn’t seem to be a way to access eg the communities tab via activitypub? Any Help?

If you're writing client-to-server part (not server-to-server part), try curl 'https://<lemmy-instance>/api/v3/community/list?sort=Hot', and an API client libraries written in Python..

[-] JustusWingert@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Hi, I'm well aware of those APIs, but the idea was to find a unified way using ActivityPub. As it stands AP seems to actually have this glaring omission at its core. I'm somewhat baffled how this skipped past so many interations. What you mentioned is certainly a valid option to access data on lemmy. But it won't work on Mastodon, or any other service only linked via ActivityPub Federation. And that's a problem. It splits the network apart at the seams.

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023

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