cjslep
commented
4 years ago Thanks Rob for reaching out!
Summarizing our video call, for you & posterity to see:
- Best place to start is ActivityStreams manipulation:
go-fed/activity/streams, for example passing an ActivityStream JSON literal string into aJSONResolver, and in callback functions (likefunc(context.Context, vocab.ActivityStreamsCreate) error {}) play around with the ActivityStreams API. - Next, check out ActivityPub: the
FederatingActoringo-fed/activity/pub, which has a small API. The devil is in the constructor, which takes a bunch of interfaces:func NewFederatingActor(c CommonBehavior, s2s FederatingProtocol, db Database, clock Clock) FederatingActor. Stub out and mess around with it.
Then, if go-fed is the solution going forward, we can talk about the ForgeFed RDF ontology and getting it code-generated for forgefed.
Some design choices/notes about go-fed I had mentioned:
For ActivityStreams:
- Focuses on vocabulary correctness at compile-time, not run-time (ex: accidentally trying to get
orderedItemsfrom a regularCollection). Consequence is binary bloat in sheer code generated. - Type assertions over reflection (faster at run-time)
- Client code uses interfaces. Thus technically, you could swap out the go-fed impl for a different code-generated or hand-tuned impl while still using the go-fed interfaces.
For ActivityPub:
- Pretty much only limits itself to the S2S and C2S spec, and no more. Has some optional default behaviors provided for things like
CreateorDelete(but defaults can be augmented or overridden). - Defers everything (and I do mean everything) not in the spec to the client code, which can make it difficult and unwieldy. Therefore, integrating into an existing codebase like gitea will be interesting, and I'm not opposed to go-fed changes to make things easier.
- Other technologies that the Fediverse community has adopted (ex: HTTPSigs, NodeInfo, webfinger) are not provided. I do have at least a supplemental httpsigs library under the go-fed banner to help, but it does take engineering work to put them together.
go-fed/activity/pubimplements a synchronous process (but can have asynchronous S2S delivery). To make async, it requires client code to callActorAPIs in a work queue or something similar, as the impl attempts to callLockandUnlockappropriately.
Concluding remarks:
- I'm open to feedback. I am working on a revamped website + tutorial, and hearing your experience learning about the library will help me write a better resource.
- go-fed is production-tested S2S, but not C2S
- Thanks for reaching out!
aschrijver
I'm hoping to work on forgefed integration in gitea, or a standalone go forge.
As there is a lot of prior work done here already it only makes sense to improve the overall community by contributing to this and related work under go-fed.
I'm not really sure where to start at the moment so just wanted to drop in here and see if there is something you would recommend to start with or somewhere else you might need help.