Oliver Lowe

Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://lemmy.world/post/11020167 I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo

I wonder whether they are aware of the ForgeFed project?

Thought that’s already supported? e.g. https://gitlab.com/diasporg/diaspora.atom

Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.

For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!

Ha good eyes! :) I have basic receive-only working with Lemmy using a virtual file system interface I wrote (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Just realised we actually spoke about this a while ago haha (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382 )

But synchronising to disk is super inefficient: too many API calls. Should subscribe using ActivityPub proper and store updates received as RFC 5322 messages.

From there we could serve the messages via NNTP. Then, finally, we could use nntpfs(4)

Does ActivityPub even share the user’s IP address with other nodes in the network?

No this is not in the specification.

A malicious instance could in theory distribute this information but it would be non-standard. Of the 2 systems I’ve studied - Mastodon and Lemmy - neither do this.

Are they talking about your IP address or the service’s?

In this scenario they would be talking about the IP address(es) of the services.

Yes, by design: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/

IMO, the problem is not them taking the information per se, but in abusing that info to further the massive surveillance apparatus that harms society.

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Yes - well, almost! I made a read-only filesystem interface to Lemmy then wrote a small program for one of the Plan 9 text editors/programming environments to access it.

The real thing would be to serve that filesystem interface over the Plan 9 file protocol (9P). Not quite there yet!

You know what’s funny? I would never use something like this (my own Lemmy client is absolutely terrible in comparison!). But I’m so happy that Alexandrite exists: it’s proof that programming and web development can still be experimental and loads of fun. Congrats to the developers!

Or at the very least make them unenforceable.

It certainly would make it a bit more impractical to enforce some of these silly laws. The new tooling provides a buffer and a way to route around some of that silliness.

You could perhaps argue that without the threat of these kinds of bills becoming reality, the impetus to develop this tooling in the first place may not have been enough to get it where it is today.