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John Spurlock

The idea here is to make it a bit easier to see how well the various players in the fediverse support the C2S side of the ActivityPub spec.

You can punch in any ActivityPub discoverable web url or fediverse handle, and BrowserPub will discover and display the underlying AP:

e.g.

social profiles: browser.pub/https://mastodon.s

or posts:
browser.pub/https://mastodon.s

or fediverse handles:
browser.pub/@Gargron@mastodon.

or even usernames (defaults to mastodon.social for now):
browser.pub/Gargron
23 August at 15:21 | Open on podcastindex.social
40 comments
John Spurlock

BrowserPub defaults to a visual representation of the object (if a known type)

everything here is powered by ActivityPub, no server-specific APIs

you can also view the underlying ActivityPub object as JSON...
23 August at 15:28 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock

... or a less JSON-ey structured outline
23 August at 15:29 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock
John Spurlock
John Spurlock

For known collection properties (like outbox, followers, featured, etc), it will preview the collection and support paging via a "next" link:

browser.pub/davew
23 August at 15:37 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock
John Spurlock
John Spurlock

Threads posts and profiles are also available, for users that have checked the magic box

Here's a post:
browser.pub/https://www.thread
23 August at 15:45 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock

While Threads does not support the replies collection yet, they do support the inReplyTo pointer, which BrowserPub renders above

browser.pub/https://www.thread
23 August at 15:47 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John
John Spurlock replied to John
John Spurlock replied to John

Hmm, I'd love to be able to render a more dynamic og:image at some point 🤔

23 August at 16:30 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John
John Spurlock replied to John

@dave Dave I was going to link the podcast guid to pi.org search, but it doesn't take guids!

podcastindex.org/search?q=4c51

23 August at 16:38 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

BrowserPub also tries to render custom emojis in content and profile headers, these are in the ActivityPub payload after all

even animated ones

browser.pub/https://bolha.one/
23 August at 16:42 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

and of course Flipboard is supported (cc @mike) nothing special, just the same ActivityPub spec implementation

browser.pub/https%3A%2F%2Fflip
23 August at 16:49 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

so even though Threads doesn't return collection items in the ActivityPub payload yet, it _does_ include the counts - so at least I can display those

just pushed it live

browser.pub/https://threads.ne
23 August at 19:25 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

Polls are not a Mastodon-specific feature, they can be expressed well in standard ActivityPub, which means standards-based apps like BrowserPub can render them

Here is a recent poll example from @evan

browser.pub/https://cosocial.c
25 August at 14:17 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John
John Spurlock replied to John

and looks like Ghost got their outbox and posts ActivityPub working

although they are not in reverse chron like everyone else (@johnonolan, was this intentional?)

browser.pub/index@activitypub.
25 August at 23:59 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

So as I'm bopping around looking at everyone's #ActivityPub in browser.pub, I wanted to have the ability to follow interesting people while I'm browsing.

I just pushed a new update that adds a "Follow" button next to every profile in the visual view

e.g. browser.pub/mastodon@mastodon.
5 September at 17:36 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

Ideally, I'd like to have these follows take effect here in my main account and not have to create a brand new profile on a brand new site.

This is where OAuth comes in - many existing fediverse servers supported federated login in a standard way

Just enter your account to start the login flow in browser.pub
5 September at 17:39 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

browser.pub requests the ability to add new follows to your account...
5 September at 17:44 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

... then stores the login info in the browser

For OAuth dorks, it'll show the token expiration and granted scope

Also whether or not the server supports the excellent OAuth server metadata spec, and whether the server supports PKCE (a security improvement that is a newer part of the spec)
5 September at 17:46 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

You'll see that only the newest Mastodon 4.3 (still beta only?) supports this new metadata, but it should be rolling out widely soon.
5 September at 17:47 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

anyway, once you have an active login it will be displayed in the top-right corner, and you can follow profiles with a tap of the "Follow" button
5 September at 17:49 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

now Pleroma is special here, it supports following like this in bog-standard ActivityPub!

ie just posting a small json payload to the logged-in user's outbox endpoint

hopefully more ActivityPub servers support this soon, as it should be very similar to what they already do for S2S
5 September at 17:53 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

misskey and micro.blog from @manton both support client registration for clients like this by simply providing a website url

it's called "indieauth" (displayed in the login info row, otherwise falls back to mastodon-style app-creation-based registration)

there is a newer emerging standard for dynamic client registration, but no one supports it yet - I'll add it when one does!

micro.blog doesn't support C2S follows via the outbox yet, but we can fallback to the micro.blog api here
5 September at 17:58 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

you'll notice that browser.pub not only requests the ability to follow, but _also_ to read, generally

this gives the logged-in user the ability to explore ActivityPub collections that may not be public, only accessible via auth (if the server supports such collections over ActivityPub C2S)

in theory, you could imagine building a thing on top of these collections that looks like your personal mastodon timeline, but using spec-standard ActivityPub

in practice, tho, here is my mastodon inbox 🤦‍♂️
5 September at 22:10 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

Pleroma, however, is a different story - a better story

here is my Pleroma account, listing my private inbox collection - essentially my home timeline

this is not public, but available to ActivityPub C2S clients like browser.pub with a valid auth token
5 September at 22:21 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

Under the hood, the personal inbox is represented as an essentially infinite ActivityPub OrderedCollection, with no 'totalItems' count property, and no 'last' pointer

I can keep iterating down my inbox reverse chron this way in the json...
5 September at 22:23 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

... or by hitting "next" in the visual view

maybe I should add some sort of automatic revealing of the next item on scroll
5 September at 22:24 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

and of course you can't see my personal Pleroma 'inbox' collection here, since you aren't logged in as me

as it should be

if anyone finds any additional endpoints available to read over C2S when authed (on any AP server impl), let me know - I'd be very curious to know what's supported out there
5 September at 22:29 | Open on podcastindex.social
John Spurlock replied to John

one more for today: just got @pixelfed oauth working too

similar to mastodon, you can add an existing pixelfed.social account, and follow any fediverse user directly from browser.pub

and, similar to mastodon, pixelfed does not seem to support any additional ActivityPub over C2S when authed
6 September at 0:09 | Open on podcastindex.social
Andy Piper replied to John

@js can I just say that you've done a really lovely job on the rendering of all the information from profiles etc here. It looks really, really good. Thank you.

23 August at 17:17 | Open on macaw.social
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