85 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
85 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
# Introduction
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## The Old Dog and Duck
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A Clojure library designed to implement the ActivityPub protocol, obviously.
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The Old Dog and Duck is clearly a pub, and it's a pub related to an activity; to whit, hunting ducks with dogs. Yes, of course one could also hunt dogs with ducks, but in practice that doesn't work so well. The point isn't whether or not I approve of hunting ducks with dogs (or vice versa); to be clear, I don't. The point is that it's a pub related to an activity, and is therefore an [ActivityPub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/).
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Are we clear?
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Good.
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Let us proceed.
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**The Old Dog and Duck** is intended to be a set of libraries to enable people to build stuff which interacts with ActivityPub. It isn't intended to be a replacement for, or clone of, Mastodon. I do think I might implement my own ActivityPub server on top of The Old Dog and Duck, that specifically might allow for user-pluggable feed-sorting algorithms and with my own user interface/user experience take, but that project is not (yet, at any rate) this project.
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## Status
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This is a long way pre-alpha. Everything will change. Feel free to play, but do so at your own risk. Contributions welcome.
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## Architecture
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There are a number of separate concerns required to implement ActivityPub. They include
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1. Parsing ActivityStreams messages received from peers and from clients;
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2. Persisting ActivityStreams objects;
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3. Delivering ActivityStreams objects to peers;
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4. Delivering ActivityStreams objects to clients.
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**NOTE THAT** what Mastodon delivers to clients is not actually in ActivityStreams format; this seems to be an ad-hoc hack that's just never been fixed and has therefore become a de-facto standard for communication between ActivityPub hosts and their clients.
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My proposal would be to deliver exactly the same ActivityStreams format to my client as to other servers. There may be a valid reason for not doing this, but if there is I will discover it in due course.
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## Proposed dog-and-duck libraries
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**NOTE THAT** at the present stage all the proposed libraries are in one package, namely this package, but that it is proposed that in future they will form separate libraries in separate packages.
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### Bar
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Where conversations happen. Handle interactions with clients.
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### Cellar
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Where things are stored. Persistance for ActivityStreams objects; I may at least initially simply copy the Mastodon postgres schema, but equally I may not.
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### Pantry
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Where deliveries are ordered and arrive; and from where deliveries onwards are despatched. Handle interactions with peers.
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### Quack
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Duck-typing for ActivityStreams objects.
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As of version 0.1.0, this is substantially the only part that is yet at all useful, and it is still a long way from finished or robust.
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### Scratch
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What the dog does when bored. Essentially, a place where I can learn how to make this stuff work, but perhaps eventually an ActivityPub server in its own right.
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## Usage
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At present, only the duck-typing functions work. To play with them, use
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```clojure
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(require '[dog-and-duck.quack.quack :as q])
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```
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## Testing
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Prior to testing, you should clone [activitystreams-test-documents](https://github.com/w3c-social/activitystreams-test-documents) into the `resources` directory. You can then test with
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```bash
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lein test
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```
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## License
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Copyright © Simon Brooke, 2022.
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This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
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terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your
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option) any later version.
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