@thisismissem @julian@community.nodebb.org Ideally, yeah! At the time I wrote mine, there wasn't a library for it in Python, so things kept getting copy&pasted. I think it was similar for JS at the time.

I don't know how easy it would be to import only the signature functions from Fedify (without using the ActivityPub parts of it), but maybe that's an option now.

@thisismissem @nodebb Yeah, if you have access to all the cryptographic primitives you need it's really not too terrible. Signatures were about 25 LOC in Pinhole: https://fietkau.software/Pinhole.git/blob/f6e243deadf741e40b8f0bd5f5de63fa42ad89dd/pinhole.py#l232

There are other valid reasons to try to move away from cavage-12, like library support, but implementation complexity isn't really one of them. Not a ton can go wrong after you get it working once.

(Although I do recall debugging an interop thing with @julian@community.nodebb.org that had to do with silly formatting minutiae.)

@fedify Thank you! I was a bit concerned with network traffic as well, although I guess in the grand scheme it's not too much. Although maybe I'll put in a duplicate filter in my code after all.

@fedify Thanks for the explanation. I have a related question that I've been meaning to ask:

If I give Fedify's sendActivity a list of recipients, does it do any deduplication or are activities sent twice if the same remote actor appears twice in my recipient list?

For example, a common addressing case is followers + tagged, and I've been wondering if I should check these for overlap myself or if I can leave it to Fedify. I couldn't find anything on this in the documentation.

@julian@community.nodebb.org Can I confess something?

When @fedify first came out, I was worried that everyone might abandon their ActivityPub implementations for the convenience of "letting someone else handle it" and that the fediverse could run into a Chrome-esque engine monopoly.

I'm honestly surprised how few projects rely on Fedify to this day. Turns out people have too much fun sticking their hands into the pipes after all!

@shauna NodeBB is approaching the problem from the perspective of traditional web forums more than Twitter-likes, so it may or may not look like what you're envisioning. But from what I can see, they're taking their federation work very seriously, including with Mastodon. So it could well be viable as a home base for a community that wants to talk in internal sub-groups a bunch, but also with the wider fediverse.

@julian@community.nodebb.org

@shauna Realistically, maybe NodeBB could enable that kinda thing in a usable way? @julian@community.nodebb.org

For Mastodon, handling conversational contexts/containers is probably a blocker to any serious advances on this idea. Even followers-only posting barely works for a back-and-forth discussion, as visibility swaps per reply between the followers of each person involved.

Some momentum is there though, and maybe Mastodon will see some advances on the issue this year.

The state of conversational contexts (February 2025)

A conversational context is what the ForumWG uses to describe what you might see as a reply tree or comment thread. One of the short-to-medium term goals of ...

NodeBB Community (community.nodebb.org)