 🆕 blog! “Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap” I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spendi… 👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/ 69 comments
 @Edent nice; I know no Symfony, and my PHP is *very* rusty, but I'd be interested in taking a look at it at least! @Edent @Floppy @manyfold @robb wrote a blog post on implementing his own ActivityPub server in PHP (https://rknight.me/blog/building-an-activitypub-server/) - it includes a section on validating the signatures, because I think it was a major pain in the arse for him too (source code: https://github.com/rknightuk/bugle/blob/main/app/Services/HttpSignature.php) @robb I don't suppose you came across the error "found an invalid character in header name"? @Edent I don’t recall that error, no sorry. This part is a such a pain. If you have your code up somewhere I’d be happy to take a look just as a second pair of eyes. @robb very kind of you! @robb ah, I stuffed up the headers. Got them working now. New error is "Verification failed for ..." Which at least is progress! @Edent Excellent! (Was putting the kid to bed and only just started looking, glad you got it sorted)  @Edent there's a fair bit of prior art listed at https://indieweb.org/checkin - micro.blog and Known have check-in posts, and there are a couple of apps to copy Swarm posts back to your own site.  @Edent yes!!! I can’t find the thread now but I was discussing this exact idea with… I think it was @tijs and @zverik a few months ago. I have no dev time to devote for it now but happy to chat if you’d like to swap ideas. In particular, I think one raison d’être for such an app (aside the obvious utility which obviously many of us got from 4sq) is to gamify submitting and verifying POIs in OSM. With a good UX and some careful thought, I’m optimistic it could really improve OSM for POIs.   @Edent the mayor thing was a tactic to help with onboarding when in a small sparse network :) @Edent I'm hooked, waiting for the next post! (no pressure on the timing though). I'm new to the OSM space, so Overpass didn't make sense for quite some time, till I searched for it online. OK gang! I now have an *extremely* basic ActivityPub server which can send messages to its follower! Next steps: * Record who is following it.  @Edent is this best done as a whole new server - creating a separate account to your "main" one for others to follow? I mean, I am sure it *has* to be because you can't just ask your existing account to publish arbitrary post metadata your client generates, or can't extend your existing client, but should clients/servers be more extensible to allow such experiments? I mean, it's not too hard to extend email like that. @kitten_tech @Edent yeah! Don't worry, I'm not saying you're doing it wrong, just that this points to a lack of extensibility in the existing things, forcing you to build a load of duplicate infra to support.your use case 😥  @Edent @kitten_tech Maybe add location data to the glitch-soc fork of Mastodon, so all of us on glitch-soc servers will get (along with all the other wonderful features in glitch-doc)? @bhawthorne @Edent ideally, add support for "pass on what you're given even if you don't understand it" support so future intrepid explorers can just modify a client, too! ( "currently listening to", "what I'm eating/drinking" and "mood" extensions come immediately to mind). Also, clients should make some effort to display any and all unknown tags they find in posts, please, so I don't need to do anything too hard to find out where @Edent is today 👍  @Edent I am just about to attempt to implement this for my blog — I don't suppose this is a library that does this? Nice! My toy server can now: ✅ Record who is following it. It doesn't do: Pretty happy with that. Not the prettiest page on the web, but I can now Geolocate my phone and find the 25 nearest named places on #OSM. Next stage is making a button to send that location to my ActivityPub server to send out a message. (This is crappy code, poorly architected. Just a Proof of Concept.) I've just reposted a public status from my new location check-in service. It doesn't handle replies or likes, but you can follow it. Expect buggy and untested weirdness 🙂  @Edent@mastodon.social what language is it made in? @denny it takes a few moments for my server to approve. It looks like it has gone through from my side - if you refresh, is your end showing approved? It's all working! You can follow @edent_location for my "FourSquare-style" check-ins to locations. TODO: 📸 Upload and store photos.  I've added a feature request to #Mastodon to display geotags.  @Edent I loved the integration with my calendar, so that after I can find back where that place was where I was last year  @Edent microformats know this as well. I toyed with this for my blog but finding a reliable map provider (without cookies) turned out to be quite difficult. I even tried setting up my own tile server for osm one day. The result was: Don't.  @Edent so, I strongly recommend looking at the full Activity Vocabulary. There are several activities specifically for check-ins. I'm excited about this project. @evan Thanks Evan, I really appreciate that! @Edent I'll put it on my list! I've got a deadline for my book on the 31st and I'm trying not to get distracted. I'll check this week. The big thing is: use `Arrive` for check-ins! And include a `summary` for servers that don't know what to do with them. @Edent Most of it is a data quality problem in deciding on the predicate to filter the data. Do you wanna check into an untitled tree or water fountain in your local park? (Filter things without a name?) What about checking into a whole city or country? Or a particular borough? Or an area that doesn't line up with a governmental/administrative area (Soho, say)? That's a thing people did on 4sq to tell friends they are visiting. How about the M25? (This place is not a place of honour etc.) @tommorris @Edent also answers aren’t necessarily consistent; you might not have enough data to filter it in the way people want. people might want to check in to Route 66, but not the M25. @Edent (Incidentally, this isn't a "don't do it", it's more a "I've played around with this in the past and you may will encounter fun weird stuff you didn't expect"—but weird stuff is good, please carry on.)  @tommorris @Edent https://github.com/GIScience/openpoiservice/ is probably worth a look  @Edent FWIW I've been working on Postmarks a bit, which also used Darius' Express AP server initially, so may be interested in having a prod here. Plus I share the interest in old 4sq, current OSM, etc. Funny, didn't we talk about this idea (on Mastodon), about a week ago... @Edent the whole idea that Mastodon doesn’t support something and PixelFed does is frustrating. ActivityPub servers should host all our vocabularies and apps show what they understand, but sadly Mastodon and every other app decided to forgo the Client to Server API and use something bespoke 😞 I've been working on my own ActivityPub site (this one, socialsoup). I want to allow user to add a location to their status / notes. Mastodon allows you to Mention users, and stores this in the tags property, as well as hashtags. Maybe this is a good place to attach a location too? I'm definitely going to follow along with what you're doing here :) |
Gregory's Server
@Edent I liked the mayor stuff. I was mayor of lots of places here in #lapalma 😉