ActivityPub @community.nodebb.org FrankM @community.nodebb.org 1w ago

Is ActivityPub too complicated?

I thought that if I entered a Fediverse address here, like '@FrankM@nrw.social,' it would follow that user, and their posts would then appear in the corresponding category.

But that's not happening. There's also no meaningful error message. The actor you see in the image probably appears because I entered an incorrect address.

Does this feature need to be enabled on the Fediverse instance 'nrw.social'?

Who can help?

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I tried to sync @testing@chebucto.club with @testing-ground.
It's automatic. But you might need to refresh the page before you see the result. Following an actor involves sending a follow activity and then waiting for an accept activity to be sent back. In Lemmy it should be sent almost immediately.

Some personal Mastodon accounts have manual approval of followers but that doesn't apply here. Still, the same communication happens under the hood.
Yeah, as mentioned - Lemmy is often quite bad at sending the 'Accept' back for a Follow. It's particularly the case if the instance hasn't heard of you before, because in the process of fetching your user and instance details, it 'forgets' about the Accept. Within Lemmy, everyone's sort of got into the habit of 'Subscribe / Unsubscribe / Subscribe'. (where the first 'subscribe' lets them get your details, and the second one actually gets an 'Accept' back.)

PieFed is more reliable at sending 'Accept' back, so it's maybe useful to check your logic from this end with a community from there, e.g. https://piefed.social/c/antisocialmedia
nrw.social is a mastodon instance, which does not create group actors. Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed do. In Lemmy terms, a group actor is called a "Community". Every lemmy instance lists their communities at /communities, e.g. https://lemmy.world/communities.

Try putting "https://lemmy.world/c/technology" into that field and see what happens.
Thank you @rimu@piefed.ngrok.app , now it's getting clearer in my head. I have added "https://lemmy.world/c/technology" , actual status is pending.

How long does this take? Is it an automatic process, or is it manually approved by an admin? So many questions...
- @FrankM Running into the same problem on my end (2 days and it seems my follow is stuck). Did you try to follow a non-group account when you got the 'null' actor on your list too? I get the feeling it's related to our endless pending on lemmy communities and such
  
  @arachnibot happy to take a closer look, since the category sync functionality should be working but might have broken in the interim during development.
  
  Can you let me know the Lemmy community you're trying to follow from your instance?
- status is pending.
  
  It gets stuck. Truth be told, it should be reworked as it's so buggy.
I did ask chatgpt, its new super familiar / friendly tone surprised me :ghost:
I think some of the words, make ActivityPub more complicated to understand. Like what is an Actor ? This may be basic to some, but Im still not sure what an Actor is in this context, and why that word was used. Would be grateful if anyone can explain in one line :)

Looks like I was wrong before: whilst it's true that Lemmy isn't always great at sending an 'Accept' back, that's not the issue here. I was thinking about it from the perspective of a Person following a Group, not a Group following a Group.

It'll be interesting to see how the Lemmy devs respond. It's not really relevant for PieFed, because I'm not sure that there's communities there that have enough activity to warrant syncing to a category, but I thought about what would happen if you tried, and it would fail. The follower would be checked to see if they are a Person, and the request would go no further if not (there's no handy error returned, though).

I'm not sure it would be possible to enable, with the way the database is currently set up. We have a 'community_member' table, that looks like:

pyfedi=# \d community_member
                         Table "public.community_member"
      Column      |            Type             | Collation | Nullable | Default
------------------+-----------------------------+-----------+----------+---------
 user_id          | integer                     |           | not null |
 community_id     | integer                     |           | not null |
 is_moderator     | boolean                     |           |          |
 is_owner         | boolean                     |           |          |
 is_banned        | boolean                     |           |          |
 notify_new_posts | boolean                     |           |          |
 created_at       | timestamp without time zone |           |          |
Indexes:
    "community_member_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (user_id, community_id)
    "ix_community_member_is_banned" btree (is_banned)
Foreign-key constraints:
    "community_member_community_id_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (community_id) REFERENCES community(id)
    "community_member_user_id_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES "user"(id)

So if the 'user_id' was actually a Group instead of a Person, then it would have a join to the wrong table.

20 comments