Description of ActivityPub protocol?

interolivary@beehaw.org to Programming@beehaw.org – 13 points –

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

10

There are various links here:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/pub/guide-for-new-activitypub-implementers

Fuck me what a rabbit hole: ActivityPub is built on ActivityStreams which use Action Vocabulary and this is all structured with JSON-LD.

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).

The overview in the spec is probably as good of a summary as anyone could give you.