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.

  • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

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

    Good luck.

    • Oliver Lowe@apubtest2.srcbeat.comOP
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      8 months ago

      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 ;)

  • dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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!

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

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

      • Quokka@quokk.auEnglish
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • Oliver Lowe@apubtest2.srcbeat.comOP
          0·
          8 months ago

          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@suppo.fiEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            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

            • Oliver Lowe@apubtest2.srcbeat.comOP
              0·
              8 months ago

              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! :)

        • Oliver Lowe@apubtest2.srcbeat.comOP
          0·
          8 months ago

          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 :(

    • Oliver Lowe@apubtest2.srcbeat.comOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

  • Lung@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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

    • muelltonne@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

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

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    8 months ago

    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!

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
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    8 months ago

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

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

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