ActivityPub Follow

Apps
1

Do you have some sort of ActivityPub feed that you’d like people to be able to follow? If you are running Mastodon, Pleroma, etc, then there is builtin remote follow support. However, software with AP functionalities from extensions do not typically have this feature (eg. WordPress, XMPP). Without this, there is no way to provide follow links (users must search for you in their AP client).

I created a general follow tool. It’s available here:

https://apfollow.mwt.me/?user={username}&instance={domain.tld}

Here is an example. You can share a url like this directly to let people follow you, or you can do some sort of fancy reverse proxy. Eg:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^users/(.*)/remote_follow$ "https://apfollow.mwt.me/?user=$1&instance=yourdomain.com" [P,L]
</IfModule>

Source code is on GitHub:

License is AGPL because I took the entire frontend for Mastodon, which is AGPL.

2 Likes
2

Spicy. Cool!

I don’t use any of those tools and instead still use the old-timey-days of RSS and my RSS Feed Aggregator like FreshRSS.

1 Like
3

I think AP is at least an order of magnitude more niche than RSS. What I like about AP is that it’s possible for a user to boost articles (which allows for natural discovery) and replies to the articles can be interpreted as comments on the original.

The disadvantage is everything else. AP is much less mature than RSS/Atom and is (1) fundamentally online and (2) is very unintuitive.

My meaning behind (2) is that I think most technical people can look at an atom file and figure out its basic structure without cracking open the Atom RFCs. There is no way that this can be done with webfinger and AP. You need to find a blog post from someone who read the RFCs or go to them yourself. I was fortunate Hugh Rundle took the time to write this helpful post: