Fedibook week 6

Yet another great Fedibook week!

There are now 39 curious users on fedibook.net, and feedback is flooding in as Issues on Codeberg and lots of great feedback in the About Fedibook group. Thank you so much.

I am on my way for a week of installation work in Germany for my daytime job, so this week's update will be a little brief.

Features this week

Edit and delete comment

You can now edit or delete your comments. Deleting a comment leaves a note that a comment was removed.

Friend and follow request via profile page

Friend and follow requests (and the opposite: unfollow, etc.) have been moved to the user's profile page. Search for a user, and you will find the options there.

Links in comments

If you write a URL in a comment, it becomes a clickable link that opens in a new tab.

Comment on comments

We now support nested comments.

Public profile

The profile page – yours or anyone else's with an ActivityPub address – is now public and does not require login. On the profile page, all your public posts are visible. This makes your Fedibook profile function as a simple blog page.

If you click on Follow or Friends, you can log in or create an account. We will remember your request, so the friend request will be sent once you are logged in.

Front page – all public posts?

I was asked to make the front page of Fedibook show all public posts. I understand the idea and see the value. However, I am not sure that feature is in line with Fedibook's key values. It would make the platform more like a publishing tool, which was not my intention. For now, I will evaluate it further.

Sticky menu

The left main menu in desktop view has become sticky. This made the top header menu button unnecessary, which freed up space in the top bar for...

Search bar

The search bar makes it possible to quickly find user profiles from any ActivityPub platform. Jump directly to the profile and send a friend or follow request from there.

Click post for comments

Click on a post to open the comment section.

Bugs

Permissions on upload folder

The default installation method does not set the correct permissions on the server's upload folder, which breaks image upload. I have updated the README about this. One day I will build an installation script to make installation on a new server as easy as possible.

Group and follow on other platforms

This week I learned about FEP-1b12 and other group initiatives for ActivityPub.

@julian@activitypub.space mentioned to me on Mastodon that the group actor is doing things wrong. It does not follow FEP-1b12.

While trying to get this right, I realized I needed a tool to inspect what is going on. So now Fedibook includes an ap-inspect script (ActivityPub inspect). It needs to be enabled by setting AP_INSPECT=true in the .env file and then started from the CLI using docker compose exec worker ./ap-inspect. This has really helped me understand ActivityPub – why did I not do this before?

Fedibook is now using FEP-1b12 for group messages to fedibook clients – but I found that Mastodon does not support FEP-1b12. To work around different possibilities on different platforms, I built a server list that keeps properties for each server we have communicated with. For now, the list just stores the group protocol we use for that server, but I expect it to be used for more purposes in the future.

User-Agent – fix for Friendica

I found that Friendica did not like the format of the user-agent. This is now fixed, and you can have friends on Friendica. Whether groups work I do not know yet.

Peertube – follow!

The follow feature for a Peertube server did not work. I think it does now – but a shared video is still not sent to the Fedibook feed. I will fix this one day, but other things are more important for now.