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 <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
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.
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
RSS is not gone - you can read RSS by mail and it's quite awesome. Check RSS2Email or Nachrichtensortiermaschine