We posted a new Core Intuition today that spans multiple weeks and a couple of recordings: catching up on Daniel’s talk, the new Micro.blog support for ActivityPub, and Apple’s recent announcements.
@manton Ok I’ve started listening and decided to try this Mastadon setup. So now that I’ve got my username (@khaled@kaa.bz) now what? How do I log into Mastadon and see the conversations? Do I need to create a new account?
@kaa Great! You don't need a Mastodon account at all. People on Mastodon can follow you using that username and replies will show up in Micro.blog automatically.
@manton what I mean by interacting is this, I want to log onto Mastadon and basically engage with some conversations (using my username).
@kaa Mastodon doesn't allow logging in like that unless you use an account on a specific server. But you can search for Mastodon users in Micro.blog and engage in conversations that way. I'll be improving the conversation view soon so that it's easier.
@kaa So you don't need to log into Mastodon to do it. You can do it right from micro.blog! You can follow and talk to people on Mastodon just like you can follow and talk to other micro.blog users, and they can do the same for you (they just need to use your username to follow you from their end).
@manton I host my own blog, so of course don't have a custom domain, so can't set a username. I would assume that @boris@micro.blog could be enabled to work. Is that possible? Can I pay you more money??? :)
@boris Thanks! 🙂 I considered allowing that, but I think requiring custom domains is the best fit for our focus on blogging and content ownership. It was a lot more work to do it this way, but I think it's worth it and plays to M.b's strengths.
@manton So I'm only halfway through your discussion of this on the episode (so maybe it'll be covered later in the episode) but does the ActivityPub support mean that people on networks other than Mastodon that use ActivityPub can also follow and reply to my blog posts? Like could someone on a Friendica or Hubzilla instance do the same? (and could I follow them?).
@DrOct Yes, but I haven't actually tested with other networks, so might need some tweaks if there are any API differences.
@manton Awesome! I assumed so, but wanted to check if there were any already known issues. I know Mastodon is the big ActivityPub network (and so the most important to target), but I also know it's meant to be interoperable between lots of different kinds of networks. Thanks for the quick reply!
@manton right. But it means I need to roll my own solution. I pay you for the cross post, but would need to run this off platform, which drives me to just run my own cross post completely. Would love to brainstorm this more...
@boris It would be really complicated to support external sites. One possible solution would be to mirror your posts to a M.b-hosted site, and then proxy a few important URLs for ActivityPub over from your domain name. I'll document how the URLs work.
@boris I started working on a little proxy tool to do exactly that. It's just an API right now, but it lets you delegate all the activitypub stuff to an external service while still using your domain name as the identity. https://github.com/aaronpk/Nautilus