If you do a thing in an open source project, and you have a hard time doing it because it's not documented, after you finish doing the thing... document it. If the project has a wiki, put it in the wiki. If it has a docs repo you can write to, put it there. Or at least blog about it so search engines can index it.

Please don't leave the solution to languish in a chat log somewhere.

Paul Baran: also apparently doing the xkcd thing 50 years before xkcd

Full paper: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3638.html

@annika Haha.

Spec: "It's easy!"

[Friendly cartoon diagrams]

Narrator: "It was not easy."

A year ago I tried learning ActivityPub, and more or less failed. I was confounded by a spec that was so abstract I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Turns out I was missing some key things.

I have written a guide to learning about ActivityPub that I wish existed a year ago when I first set out to learn how to write social media servers that conform to the spec:

https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

@Shamar @amz3 @steko I will definitely take a look at GNUnet. Just also want to clarify that I'm hardly a Mozilla person. I'm being paid by them for ten months to do independent research and a lot of my conclusions actually go against their interests (for example, I'm pro internet, not necessarily pro www). This is also why I'm doing intense research into ARPANET: https://write.as/365-rfcs/365-ietf-rfcs-a-50th-anniversary-dive

I contacted the Computer History Museum and paid them a small fee to have them scan the first 9 RFCs. I'm happy to say those scans are now online.

My post with interesting excerpts and things I learned looking at the scans: https://write.as/365-rfcs/update-scans-of-early-rfcs

The listing of the scans in their catalog, with a link to the PDF: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102661172

You can follow along with my series commenting on the first 365 RFCs here @365-rfcs

@aparrish Also this other thing they make??? https://xxyxyz.org/even/

makes me wanna learn python

@silkevicious @aral Here's the source code: https://github.com/dariusk/activtypub-to-rss

A while back I built a site that converts RSS feeds to ActivityPub actors that you can subscribe to from Mastodon and other ActivityPub-compliant social networks: https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

I've now also published the source code: https://github.com/dariusk/activtypub-to-rss

I actually built a little toy service (that I will also eventually open source) which converts any RSS feed to an ActivityPub actor that you can subscribe to in Mastodon (or any other AP-compatible client).

Play with it if you like! It is SUPER rough and most feeds end up horribly rendered in Mastodon but it's still kinda cool to see it work: https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

I'm happy to announce that my barebones ActivityPub server, implemented in Node.js/Express, is now open source! I intend for it to be a reference implementation for developers who are adding ActivityPub to their own services, but also it is an application server that you can build on if you want.

In other words, t's a few hundred lines of code that lets you create Mastodon-compatible accounts that can accept follow requests and post stuff to their followers.

https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub