Hey does anybody know if there’s a description of ActivityPub available that isn’t just the spec? I realized I don’t actually know how the protocol works, and I’d be interested in learning more. May have to just bite the bullet and dive into the spec – it doesn’t actually look too bad based on a quick glance – but a summary would be cool
Fuck me what a rabbit hole: ActivityPub is built on ActivityStreams which use Action Vocabulary and this is all structured with JSON-LD.
Its easier to grok if you watch lemmy server logs
It’s even worse than that. :) I’ve read the 4 standards (which, to be fair, are very pleasant to read, we’re lightyears away from xhtml docs), and I still don’t understand how the search feature works in Lemmy and Mastodon. Because the standards are very minimalists : they describe what messages look like (the various activities a user can do), ActivityPub itself describe the http structure of the inbox and outbox (the requests to do to use them), and… that’s about it. There is nothing about discovery, so I suppose now applications implement it as they see fit, which means on top of understanding the standards, you need to understand actual implementations (that’s what I’m going to read next, at least).
I think that for example the search feature has nothing to do with activity pub but it’s a feature of each of those software that are using activity pub (Lemmy, mastodon etc). I would guess it operates on those internal structures each of those implementations are using.