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 (@blenderdumbass@blenderdumbass.org), 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
I’m not the most knowledgeable about Mastodon’s APub implementation, but having a look at the
Actorof 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
@contextis present.