ENiGMA½ ActivityPub Support in Progress

ActivityPub Comes to ENiGMA½

Jumping on the bandwagon of many others following the ongoing Elon Musk Twitter disaster, a lot of people including myself have finally made a real move to decentralized ActivityPub backed Twitter-esk systems such as Mastodon. The parallels between ActivityPub/Mastodon and BBSes are fairly evident: Decentralized, open protocols, ability to be “offline first”, and of course interaction between systems that each have their own local communities. This has caught the attention of a number of us in the BBS community, notably @richinseattle@infosec.exchange and @cognitivegears@bitbang.social who was the first to open up a feature request on the subject and really put the wild hair up my ass as it were.

With that said, the feature is now in active development.

Integration Points

Some of the integration points we’d like to support include:

  • √ Direct user to user (or Actor to Actor in ActivityPub talk) messaging via the private mail area
  • √ WebFinger support
  • √ Ability to follow and be followed
  • √ New user avatar generation
  • Federated browsing, posting, etc.
  • Group support once a suitable standard can be identified (this is something the Mastodon authors and others are also looking into). This would allow mapping between local area tags similar to FTN networks
  • …much more!

Screen Shot of a Direct Message

Shown above, the system will even generate random avatars for users uh, Actors by default! We plan on allowing users to modify their avatar images by supplying a new URL and/or uploading their own image.

…stay tuned for more!