Introducing ActivityPub.Space

The in-person events at FediCon in Vancouver lit a fire in the Canadian ActivityPub community. One of the louder calls were for a place in the fediverse for ActivityPub discussions; a place for groups to form and for long-running discussions to be had.

I was more than happy to get involved. I also wanted such a place, and I’ve discussed it on and off for the past year. ActivityPub development discussions are fragmented across multiple disconnected channels, and none of them fully capture the entirety (or a majority, or even a sizeable minority) of the AP developer community. ActivityPub.Space is my answer to that call.

One constant about ActivityPub is that all ActivityPub developers are on the fediverse, and so it only makes sense that discussions about AP development should also take place on the fediverse.

At the same time, the “fediverse” isn’t one singular entity. jaz@mastodon.iftas.org famously quipped “There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.” While I can’t make guarantees about this site connecting with a million fediverses, I can say that it does connect with the microblogiverse, the blogiverse (WordPress blogs!), and the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/MBin/NodeBB/Discourse).

So how does it work?

The site is divided up into several categories:

• General Discussion is for any non-technical discussions about ActivityPub
• Technical Discussion is for technical deep-dives
• Meta contains discussions about this site itself
• Random is for everything else (there’s always a “Random” category on a forum, isn’t there…?)

We also pull in content direct from Fediverse news outlets such as “Week in Fediverse”, “Connected Places”, and “Relay, by We Distribute”.

On the threadiverse side, we directly link to several other fediverse-focused communities on Lemmy and Piefed.

We utilise a number of relays to both distribute local content out and receive content from the wider microblogiverse. When content comes in via microblogs, they’re not usually categorized, so we check for relevant hashtags and automatically categorize them into one of the local categories.

The wonderful thing about this site is that it fully federates, which means you can follow all of these categories from your app of choice. You don’t even have to register a local account if you don’t want to, but you definitely can (and should!) if you want the best experience browsing the categorized topics.

The categories today are rather broad, but over time I hope to split them up into smaller topics based on user demand. Give the site a try today!

@julian This is great, I'm going to watch this forum as closely as I can!

@jaz

@julian just another ActivityPub Discussion Space ?

@julian And works great, too!

@jaz

drq@mastodon.ml thanks!

I noticed you tagged @jaz@mastodon.iftas.org. There’s lots of opportunity for T&S conversations to be captured (in the nicest way possible of course) by ActivityPub.Space. There have been some amazing conversations carried out over fedi and I wish a lot of them were archived in some way.

naturzukunft@mastodon.social indeed! You’re right, at its core it is yet another ActivityPub discussion space.

The main difference is that this one tries to integrate more deeply (or in some cases, at all) into the fediverse than others.

Using ActivityPub.Space to discuss AP concepts should be as simple as just using your own fedi account, no new account to register, no new site to check. We’re all busy people, so not having to dedicate additional mind-share to a new site was an important thing for me to get right.

At the same time these discussions won’t be lost to the mists of time. They’ll be categorized and accessible for the future!

@julian Excited for this. And going to try and just follow from this account and not have yet another handle. HAHA! We'll see how that goes!

@julian This is great, I'm going to watch this forum as closely as I can!

@jaz

@drq @julian I'm going to force myself to see how well I can interact at a distance without creating a new account, more of a learn as I go thing that anything else, I'm curious (and hopeful) that this can work well without needing a new account somewhere. Looking forward to participating!

@jaz Well, from what I gather, looks like you really don't, I'm writing this from my pretty much only account which is Mastodon.

@julian

@drq @julian ditto, but now to see if I can see and follow the conversations in other threads where I wasn't tagged...

@jaz There's an actor to each secion:

@general
@technical-discussion
@random
@meta

Looks like if you subscribe to one, you get all posts in that category.

@julian

@drq @julian

I'm following all of them using Mastodon 4.4.3, but not getting posts as yet. Only posts in reply to the one that tagged me.

@jaz Hmm... Let's see what the actor shows in json.

Hmmm... The outbox seems to return empty. That's some bullshit.

@julian

@drq @julian

I'm following all of them using Mastodon 4.4.3, but not getting posts as yet. Only posts in reply to the one that tagged me.