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ActivityPub: What’s an Actor?

https://www.stevebate.net/activitypub-whats-an-actor/

Published: July 6, 2025 13:52

The question seems like it should have an obvious answer, but that's not necessarily the case. There are several possible interpretations of the term actor in ActivityPub. So, what is an ActivityPub actor? A Profession? According to Oxford's Advanced…

ActivityPub Client API: A Way Forward

https://www.stevebate.net/activitypub-client-api-a-way-forward/

Published: July 6, 2025 11:59

The ActivityPub Client-to-Server (C2S) protocol was envisioned as a cornerstone of the decentralized social web, along with the Server-to-Server (S2S) protocol. Standardized by the W3C in 2018, C2S defines how user-facing applications, such as mobile apps…

Extending ActivityPub: A Recipe

https://www.stevebate.net/extending-activitypub-a-recipe/

Published: September 14, 2024 06:08

Occasionally there are online discussions about using schema.org vocabularies with ActivityPub (AP) and Activity Streams 2.0 (AS2). There are many ways to do this, but this article will explore one approach using a schema.org Recipe type. The information…

FIRM: Authorization Support

https://www.stevebate.net/firm-authorization-support/

Published: September 14, 2024 05:41

Initial ActivityPub authorization (authz) support has been added to the FIRM software. It's a plugin and specific implementations can customize the policies. Unfortunately, ActivityPub has very minimal guidance on authorization and access control, so…

FIRM Server 0.2.0: – Linked Data

https://www.stevebate.net/firm-server-0-2-0-linked-data/

Published: September 5, 2024 04:18

Version 0.2.0 of the FIRM Server has been released. This version adds support for Linked Data storage and queries. The new RdfResourceStore uses Oxigraph to store RDF information for ActivityPub and other types of data. The FIRM Core logic is the same…

FIRM: Initial Release

https://www.stevebate.net/firm-released/

Published: September 3, 2024 05:01

FIRM is a Federated Information Resource Manager. It's a flexible server platform for experimentation with ActivityPub and Social Web software. The focus is not on performance or scalability, but on the ability to create rapid prototypes of new…

Fediverse of Things and LLMs

https://www.stevebate.net/fediverse-of-things-and-llms/

Published: April 8, 2024 11:35

There has been discussion about using ActivityPub (AP) for federated home automation or Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This article describes some related experimentation. The post Fediverse of Things and LLMs appeared first on Steve Bate.

ActivityPub: An Inbox is Not a Queue

https://www.stevebate.net/activitypub-an-inbox-is-not-a-queue/

Published: February 4, 2024 14:21

It's not unusual to see AP Fediverse posts discussing message queue middleware and message brokers and pondering whether using them is conformant with "inboxes" as defined in the ActivityPub Recommendation (AP). The answer is that conformance is not…

ActivityPub: A Box is not a Timeline

https://www.stevebate.net/a-box-is-not-a-timeline/

Published: July 22, 2023 17:37

A key concept in the ActivityPub specification is the inbox and outbox. These are ordered collections of activities where the inbox contains activities received from other actors (typically on other servers) and the outbox contains activities produced by…

ActivityPub Test Suite Redux

https://www.stevebate.net/activitypub-testsuite/

Published: July 14, 2023 11:52

There's recently been much discussion on the Fediverse about ActivityPub (AP) testing and associated test suites. The original ActivityPub test suite, originally hosted at activitypub.rocks, is frequently mentioned. The test suite hasn't been running for…