Right now I follow a few Mastodon users via an RSS-to-Email service,
but the problem with that is that you can't follow private
accounts/see followers-only toots. It would be great to have a full
email bridge.
Ah yes know exactly what you mean. I follow Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy
stuff via RSS too.
I have a little program which follows/unfollows:
apfollow kevincox@lemmy.ml
apfollow -u kevincox@lemmy.ml
Then things get delivered to my inbox. That's been working ok.
I'm adding a "Following" section to the docs soon.
But I think the main idea is getting Activity into a RFC5322 message
in a filesystem.
The system doesn't really care how that file is written.
It could be from an ActivityPub server sending stuff to you.
But it could also be from reading a RSS feed and fetching the items.
My first stab at this was actually a couple of scripts which dumped my
Mastodon timeline and some Lemmy stuff to message files.
So if my ActivityPub-email bridge was running you wouldn't also be
able to access a Mastodon UI and for example browse other posts.
What I do now is clunky.
First, I've written a couple of very basic frontends
using both the Lemmmy & Mastodon API. These expose the unique ID of
each post, which I copy/paste around...
(like commenting on a random post I was linked to).
I run this command:
apubget -m https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238 > comment.eml
Then open the file in a mail client, and reply to it.
Like I said: pretty clunky! :D
One thing I've thought about is hijacking the header's Subject field
to hint to apas that we're replying to something.
Modifying Subject is exposed in more mail clients than being able to
modify arbitrary fields in the header (ideally we set In-Reply-To).
For example for this message I'm writing now:
To: kevincox@lemmy.ml
Subject: https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238
Ah yes know exactly what you mean bla bla bla...
Taking it further, frontends could render mailto: links.
Here's one to reply to your message:
mailto:kevincox@lemmy.ml?cc=fediverse@lemmy.world&subject=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238
Using Subject as both the name or inReplyTo properties of an Activity depending on its value feels unclear.
Reading RFC 6068,
it's theoretically possible that we could inject a In-Reply-To in a mailto URL.
It's up to the mail application to interpret it.
mailto:kevincox@lemmy.ml?cc=fediverse@lemmy.world&in-reply-to=%3Chttps%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238%3E
This encodes the message:
To: kevincox@lemmy.ml
CC: fediverse@lemmy.world
In-Reply-To: <https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238>
bla bla bla
Just tested and found that MailMate actually handles this.
Still feels unclear...
I dunno. What do you think?