10mo ago

Weird idea continues connecting fediverse and email

What have I done?! My abomination of an idea of bridging my email and ActivityPub progresses. If you see this message, something is working! Comments replies are welcome as it's a good test of this system :)

People keep saying ActivityPub is a lot like email. If it's so similar to email, could I use my email client to interact with the fediverse?

Previously I did this by writing a SMTP interface to the Mastodon HTTP API. That worked. But as we probably know, the fediverse is not Mastodon; it's really ActivityPub. The real deal would be working with ActivityPub directly, not the Mastodon HTTP API.

And that's now (mostly?) working! In shonky diagram form, sending looks like this:

 undefined

        laptop --SMTP--> my_server --ActivityPub--> fediverse

Replies look like this:

 undefined

        fediverse --ActivityPub--> my_server --SMTP--> mailbox <--IMAP-- laptop

my_server translates back and forth between ActivityPub messages and mail messages.

For example given the message:

 undefined

        Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2024 16:37:59 +1100
    From: Oliver Lowe <otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com>
    To: localtesting@aussie.zone
    Subject: test 2

    test hello world!

The following ActivityPub message is created:

 undefined

        {
        "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        "id":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/outbox/1709703480070628170",
        "type":"Note",
        "name":"test 2",
        "to": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting","https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],
        "cc": ["https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting"],
        "published":"2024-03-06T16:37:59+11:00",
        "attributedTo":"https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/actor.json",
        "content":"test hello world!",
        "mediaType":"text/markdown"
    }

There's still a lot of bugs (of course) and unimplemented bits (of course). I can't call this a proper fediverse service yet. I'm going to roll with this for a bit and see how it holds up.

57 comments

Dude was so preoccupied about whether he could, that he never stopped to think whether he should.
- Oh I stopped and thought whether I should. The answer was "probably not" every time...

LOL, you maniac. You did it, you finally did it!

Brilliant, who needs new fancy apps when you have email clients
Tell Google to give us back our RSS feeds too, they stole em
Then there's the irc client bridge to think about, posts could be channels and you reply in em
And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an executive summary of your memes for the day
- And ofc the extra spicy sms bridge where an AI gives you an executive summary of your memes for the day
  needs more crypto
- RSS is not gone - you can read RSS by mail and it's quite awesome. Check RSS2Email or Nachrichtensortiermaschine

Excuse my ignorance but how will the fediverse defend itself against email spam?
- Excuse my ignorance but how will the fediverse defend itself against email spam?
  That's a good question. Right now there's very little stopping people from spinning up some ActivityPub server and blasting out messages. I'm actually surprised at how little ActivityPub spam there is currently.
  One of the awesome things about the fediverse is how anti-commercial it is right now. Maybe it's not a major target for spam because there's not a lot of money in it.
- Defederation would be my guess
  
  But if you can keep spamming our (heh) a new site for like 99c a domain name, you could do this a lot despite getting banned.
  The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but that really harms the ability for new sites to appear.

I hereby bestow upon ye the title of "Interoperability Warlock", for ye are tampering with forces beyond this mortal realm.

The ghost of Lemmy Kilmister graces ur presence! 🎸🎤
Forward this to at least 3 of ur friends and you will have ur wish granted! 🤩
3 friends - ur wish granted in 5 years🌟⭐
5 friends - in 3 years
10 friends - in 1 year
20 friends - in 6 months
30 friends - in 3 months
50 friends - in 1 month
100 friends - TOMORROW! 🌠🌠🌠
But be careful, if you don't pass on the good luck, Lemmy's ghost will HAUNT you in 3 days!!! 👻😱😱 Hurry!
[The only thing missing is random colours of text]

@otl well done!
- Thanks for replying from friendica! Confirming message received OK :)
  
  @otl
  You're welcome! Great that it works :)
  @fediverse

This is cool. Keep working on it.

Sounds awesome! Good work. Does it also send you an update of how many upvotes you get? (Random thought)
Good luck.
- Does it also send you an update of how many upvotes you get?
  Well, I receive the corresponding ActivityPub "Like"s from the servers. But right now I just drop the message. I suppose that could turn into a mail message with a body like "user X liked your post" or something, but that doesn't feel like a natural mapping to me.
  I'm also one of those people that hides upvote & boost counts in my Mastodon app ;)
  
  Thats actually very smart imo.

This is an excellent idea. It's gateways like this that will continue to offer options that are not available on other platforms.
Look forward to seeing how this evolves!

This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet? It's basically a shared inbox thats whole intent is threaded conversation. Sound familiar?
- This is interesting, but have you considered porting to Usenet?
  Yes that's on the list! Now that I have a whole bunch of RFC822 files, (in Maildirs) I can also serve them over read-only NNTP. This was the original goal actually - I like the idea of using the simpler protocol NNTP over IMAP to read stuff.
- Is Usenet opensource?
  
  It's a protocol, made with open RFC docs.

Reply All: Hello?

Looks like a really fun project and honestly, this looks like the future of mailinglists (fuck mailinglists). Do keep working on it. I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.
👏
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.
  Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?
  
  Darn it, you got me. I hadn't thought about it more deeply, but now I'll give it a few minutes.
  So yeah, a lemmy UI to LKML would make the experience much better. Obviously the LKML serves two purposes: discussion and code review, for which the latter lemmy probably isn't too well equipped, but it would help make it more approachable.
  Probably to make it work there'd need to be some kind of listener. I imagine signing up to a mailinglist with an email address of the domain running your software would suffice. Incoming emails would then be converted to activitypub messages and sent to the lemmy server you control.
  You'd have two classes of email addressed: list email addresses which map to lemmy communities and user email addresses which map to users on the lemmy server (which could also be remote users in the fediverse). The list email addresses are there to create posts in the lemmy community and populate existing lemmy posts (created in the mailinglist) with responses from the mailinglist (response = comment).
  A user on lemmy on lemmy commenting on a post from a mailinglist would be automatically signed up to the mailinglist with a user email address that's dynamically created (I think your email has to be signed up otherwise the mailinglist rejects it). Upon successful signup, the response would be sent using their email address to the maillinglist thread.
  The other way around, a comment would show up on lemmy with email address and username of the person that responded on the mailinglist.
  (10 minutes later) After writing it out, I'm not sure it's what you're doing and more like a bridge, but maybe it'll inspire you. Who knows. There's probably something I'm missing and probably this isn't even what your intention was when you started out with this.
  Anyway, do your thing dude and have fun!
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You're weird. I like you.

Hello from Lemmy!

When you specify To: localtesting@aussie.zone how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead?
- When you specify To: localtesting@aussie.zone how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead?
  Good question
  The process of going from that email-like address to an ActivityPub Actor (https URL) is done by WebFinger. So whatever we get back from that lookup is who we send the message to. For example, when we look up localtesting@aussie.zone we get this response (truncated for readability):
  undefined
  
  { "rel": "self", "type": "application/activity+json", "href": "https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting", "properties": { "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group" } }
  The value for type, application/activity+json tells us that we can send ActivityPub stuff to it.
  You can play around with WebFinger in the browser.
  your account: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=binomialchicken%40lemmy.blahaj.zone
  my one: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=otl%40apubtest2.srcbeat.com
  Hope that makes sense?
  
  Very cool!
- Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !localtesting@aussie.zone