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
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?