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.
I mean you already could do that with something like ActivityPub proxy or just change your instance domain every time. If that's such a risk, why aren't people doing it now?