otl ,

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 <otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com>
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.

dumpsterlid , (edited )

Hi is your stamina not what it used to be in the the bedroom? For only $69.99 all your problems can be solved with this As Bestus Men’s Enrichment Cream. Just clink the link here! —> Enlarge Me Now

Sorry… just trying to make you feel a little more at home, I know it must be disorienting coming from Email as that is a very long way away. I tried to learn a little bit about your customs and give you a customary greeting from your culture!

otl OP ,

UNSUBSCRIBE

;)

otl OP ,

UNSUBSCRIBE

;)

helenslunch ,

Error 404, sorry that link doesn't seem to be working right now, please try again later.

abbadon420 ,

404 - erections not working

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Dude was so preoccupied about whether he could, that he never stopped to think whether he should.

otl OP ,

Oh I stopped and thought whether I should. The answer was "probably not" every time...

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

LOL, you maniac. You did it, you finally did it!

lung ,
@lung@lemmy.world avatar

Brilliant, who needs new fancy apps when you have email clients

Tell Google to give us back our RSS feeds too, they stole em

Then there's the irc client bridge to think about, posts could be channels and you reply in em

And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an executive summary of your memes for the day

otl OP ,

And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an
executive summary of your memes for the day

needs more crypto

muelltonne ,

RSS is not gone - you can read RSS by mail and it's quite awesome. Check RSS2Email or Nachrichtensortiermaschine

maniacalmanicmania ,
@maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone avatar

Excuse my ignorance but how will the fediverse defend itself against email spam?

otl OP ,

Excuse my ignorance but how will the fediverse defend itself against email spam?

That's a good question. Right now there's very little stopping people from
spinning up some ActivityPub server and blasting out messages. I'm
actually surprised at how little ActivityPub spam there is currently.

One of the awesome things about the fediverse is how anti-commercial it
is right now. Maybe it's not a major target for spam because there's
not a lot of money in it.

AVincentInSpace ,

Defederation would be my guess

Marsupial ,
@Marsupial@quokk.au avatar

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.

otl OP ,

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.

If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would
be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites.

What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky
to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to
entry is way, way too high :(

otl OP ,

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.

If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would
be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites.

What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky
to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to
entry is way, way too high :(

Skelectus ,
@Skelectus@suppo.fi avatar

I joined fediseer with this lemmy instance. I don't know what's going to happen with your self-built software, but getting a guarantee is easy, if your instance looks credible. I'm not aware of anyone that uses it as a filter at this point either.

Anyway, this is an awesome project. If you keep working on it and need a fediseer guarantor for the site, I'm happy to do that.

See their lemmy community: lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/fediseer

otl OP ,

Oh wow awesome. Thanks so much!

It needs a bit more fleshing out, removing a bit of hardcoding too.
And of course I want to publishit under an open source licence too.
Thanks for the tip - I've written it down in the growing TODO file! :)

Draconic_NEO ,
@Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

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.

I mean you already could do that with something like ActivityPub proxy or just change your instance domain every time.
If that's such a risk, why aren't people doing it now?

Feathercrown ,

I hereby bestow upon ye the title of "Interoperability Warlock", for ye are tampering with forces beyond this mortal realm.

Rentlar ,

The ghost of Lemmy Kilmister graces ur presence! 🎸🎤

Forward this to at least 3 of ur friends and you will have ur wish granted! 🤩

  • 3 friends - ur wish granted in 5 years🌟⭐
  • 5 friends - in 3 years
  • 10 friends - in 1 year
  • 20 friends - in 6 months
  • 30 friends - in 3 months
  • 50 friends - in 1 month
  • 100 friends - TOMORROW! 🌠🌠🌠

But be careful, if you don't pass on the good luck, Lemmy's ghost will HAUNT you in 3 days!!! 👻😱😱 Hurry!

[The only thing missing is random colours of text]

anders ,
@anders@rytter.me avatar

@otl well done!

otl OP ,

Thanks for replying from friendica! Confirming message received OK :)

anders ,
@anders@rytter.me avatar

@otl
You're welcome! Great that it works :)
@fediverse

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

Sounds awesome! Good work. Does it also send you an update of how many upvotes you get? (Random thought)

Good luck.

otl OP ,

Does it also send you an update of how many upvotes you get?

Well, I receive the corresponding ActivityPub "Like"s from the
servers. But right now I just drop the message. I suppose that could
turn into a mail message with a body like "user X liked your post" or
something, but that doesn't feel like a natural mapping to me.

I'm also one of those people that hides upvote & boost counts in
my Mastodon app ;)

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

Thats actually very smart imo.

hperrin ,

This is cool. Keep working on it.

mySFWaccount ,

Reply All: Hello?

fmstrat ,

This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet? It's basically a shared inbox thats whole intent is threaded conversation. Sound familiar?

onlinepersona ,

Is Usenet opensource?

SineSwiper ,
@SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

It's a protocol, made with open RFC docs.

onlinepersona ,

TIL. Always thought it was software.

otl OP ,

This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet?

Yes that's on the list! Now that I have a whole bunch of RFC822 files,
(in Maildirs) I can also serve them over read-only NNTP. This was the
original goal actually - I like the idea of using the simpler protocol
NNTP over IMAP to read stuff.

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

This is an excellent idea. It's gateways like this that will continue to offer options that are not available on other platforms.

Look forward to seeing how this evolves!

onlinepersona ,

Looks like a really fun project and honestly, this looks like the future of mailinglists (fuck mailinglists). Do keep working on it. I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.

👏

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

otl OP ,

I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.

Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?

onlinepersona ,

Darn it, you got me. I hadn't thought about it more deeply, but now I'll give it a few minutes.

So yeah, a lemmy UI to LKML would make the experience much better. Obviously the LKML serves two purposes: discussion and code review, for which the latter lemmy probably isn't too well equipped, but it would help make it more approachable.

Probably to make it work there'd need to be some kind of listener. I imagine signing up to a mailinglist with an email address of the domain running your software would suffice. Incoming emails would then be converted to activitypub messages and sent to the lemmy server you control.

You'd have two classes of email addressed: list email addresses which map to lemmy communities and user email addresses which map to users on the lemmy server (which could also be remote users in the fediverse). The list email addresses are there to create posts in the lemmy community and populate existing lemmy posts (created in the mailinglist) with responses from the mailinglist (response = comment).

A user on lemmy on lemmy commenting on a post from a mailinglist would be automatically signed up to the mailinglist with a user email address that's dynamically created (I think your email has to be signed up otherwise the mailinglist rejects it). Upon successful signup, the response would be sent using their email address to the maillinglist thread.

The other way around, a comment would show up on lemmy with email address and username of the person that responded on the mailinglist.

(10 minutes later) After writing it out, I'm not sure it's what you're doing and more like a bridge, but maybe it'll inspire you. Who knows.
There's probably something I'm missing and probably this isn't even what your intention was when you started out with this.

Anyway, do your thing dude and have fun!

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

otl OP ,

Hey mate thanks for writing all that down. Gives me a few ideas - in
particular how NNTP could fit in to the equation.

LKML can be accessed by a usenet client at nntp.lore.kernel.org. In
theory, then, it should be possible to at least read both LKML and
ActivityPub stuff hosted at the same NNTP server. To get that working
means making sure all the conversion and mapping of concepts are as
clean as possible. It's a good test!

Thanks again!

helenslunch ,

But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it's really ActivityPub.

It's not though! Fediverse = federated universe, and encompasses all federate platforms. I learned this recently myself also.

Emperor ,
@Emperor@feddit.uk avatar

You're weird. I like you.

swab148 ,
@swab148@startrek.website avatar

Hello from Lemmy!

binomialchicken ,

When you specify To: localtesting@aussie.zone how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead?

CommunityLinkFixer Bot ,

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !localtesting

otl OP ,

When you specify To: localtesting@aussie.zone how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead?

Good question

The process of going from that email-like address to an ActivityPub
Actor (https URL) is done by WebFinger. So whatever we get back from
that lookup is who we send the message to. For example, when we look
up localtesting@aussie.zone we get this response (truncated for
readability):

{
  "rel": "self",
  "type": "application/activity+json",
  "href": "https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting",
  "properties": {
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group"
  }
}

The value for type, application/activity+json tells us that we can send ActivityPub stuff to it.

You can play around with WebFinger in the browser.

Hope that makes sense?

binomialchicken ,

Very cool!

InternetCitizen2 ,

Test

Z4rK ,

Cool, now do it over Ping!

otl OP ,

Don't tempt me :D

kittykittycatboys ,
@kittykittycatboys@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

it seems to hav wonky timestamp ? it appears to me to be sent -21s ago XP

mvirts ,

Hmmm
🙃

📧📧📧

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

So this comment I am writing is going to appear as an email in a chain? Neat!

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