express-activitypub

Oh I love this! I've been trying to understand ActivityPub from first principles, looking for a really simple hackable server. (Really what I want is a server that lets me write the ActivityPub equivalent of CGI scripts to easily host diverse content.) I've been failing to find a simple example server other than maybe Darius Kazemi's https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub This little static file experiment is a great teaching tool. To folks complaining about conflating ActivityPub with Mastodon, part of his goal here is to do the minimum ActivityPub implementation so that his account looks a certain way on Mastodon. Other ActivityPub instances might be asking for different requests; he's doing the Mastodon minimum.

With the ActivityPub "Fediverse" each publisher only controls the instance they publish to, not the entire network at large. Anyone can run an instance of a server implementing the protocol and anyone can subscribe to messages published by a microblogger. What experience do you have here, and have you read the protocols yet? Here's a reference implementation: https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub My larger statement here is that organizations that the public give tax dollars into should be running open infrastructure that they self-manage and would then provision accounts for their users (users in this case being the agencies that utilize and publish to social media feeds and the offices of elected officials that do the same), and not be subscribers to centralized social media services (that is, twitter, facebook, instagram, et c