this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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My friend is working on adding ActivityPub support to his blog platform (BDServer) so people can follow/comment from Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.

Current status: Lemmy and Misskey can find and follow his account (@[email protected]), but Mastodon can't find it at all, even though he sees proper ActivityPub requests hitting his server.

The technical details are pretty gnarly - RSA signature verification, HTTP header recreation, multi-threading issues. He wrote up the full journey here: Please Help Me With Activity Pub

If anyone has ActivityPub experience or wants to take a look at the code (Python), we have a Matrix room for BDServer development. Any insights on why different platforms behave differently would be super helpful.

https://matrix.to/#/#bdserver:tchncs.de

Source code: ActivityPub.py

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe this kind of discussion will get more interested people on [email protected] .

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Happy cake day! ๐ŸŽ‚

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Did something change since this was posted?
I can look it up properly on mastodon.
You have to be signed in to fetch accounts on mastodon, is that the problem?

Are you using any framework to build the site? There's a few libraries for activitypub.
These links could be helpful: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-activitypub-development/

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Seems like somebody mentioned the account on the fediverse that started a chain reaction of various instances requesting a bunch of stuff. Which made it to Mastodon.social too. It still doesn't work though.

The server is written in python and the idea is to make it deploy-able without needing to install anything extra. So I'm trying to implement my own activity pub.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

For what it's worth your blog does show up fine in NodeBB as well. Perhaps you are missing the @context property and so Mastodon is refusing to parse it?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's for django, but take a look into my ActivityPub Toolkit. It is designed to be compliant with ActivityPub and not with any particular implementation, so it should be easy for you to adapt to your own needs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This doesn't have any link to code. And all the other buttons say that the docs are not implemented yet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Running curl https://blenderdumbass.org/activitypub/account/blenderdumbass -H "Accept: application/activity+json" twice in a row outputs some bunkerweb anti-spam stuff.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

try spoofing a user-agent or torifying it maybe

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

While I'm sure that would let me see the article, mastodon probably wouldn't handle it well.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also: bunker blocks me 100% of the time on individual articles.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Should not too I removed all blocks.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I would say for now the most issue is about acually pulling posts.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm not the most knowledgeable about Mastodon's APub implementation, but having a look at the Actor of that profile, it might be because it's invalid JSON-LD. Now, Mastodon doesn't actually do proper JSON-LD checks, you can follow PieFed profiles from Mastodon and they don't produce proper JSON-LD, but they do include "https://w3id.org/security/v1" in their @context, and doing a code search of Mastodon's source code does show some checks for if that's included.

Lemmy's I am familiar with and irrc it doesn't even check if @context is present.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I was trying something on lemmy a while ago and it required an @context.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

I don't know if somethings changed, but it actually doesn't. This lines would need to be WithContext<SharedInboxActivities>> for that to be the case, and just to make sure I tested against a local running main and was able to send activities to it without the @context just fine.