Re: Implementing Federation, Part I

Marcus, this is a really helpful blog post.

As a community group at the W3C, we can publish Reports:

https://www.w3.org/community/reports/reqs/

Reports are the closest thing to “official” documentation from the CG. 
We can use them for new specifications, or for documenting existing 
practices. Or, really, for anything (processes, overviews, research, 
whatever).

I think there are two areas of documentation that we could provide 
really helpful guidance to implementers with:

  * *ActivityPub and WebFinger.*How to look up an ActivityPub actor with
    a WebFinger ID. How to generate a WebFinger ID for an ActivityPub actor.
  * *ActivityPub and HTTP Signatures*: Which HTTP Signature version we
    use. How to make a signed request. How to verify a signed request.


Making these reports doesn’t commit the CG or ActivityPub to these other 
standards forever. But it would help implementers today make software 
that’s compatible with the rest of the fediverse. It would also provide 
a starting point for improvement.

This isn’t/everything/ that’s needed beyond AP to make a fediverse 
server, but it would be a big step forward.

Chairs: I’d like to put this topic on the agenda for the next CG meeting.

Marcus: would you consider editing one of these Reports, if the group 
decides to go ahead with this idea?

Evan

On 2023-12-16 2:52 p.m., Marcus Rohrmoser wrote:
> Yesterday I wrote a small piece about what I learned about activitypub federation so far.
>
> https://blog.mro.name/2023/12/implementing-federation-i/
>
> Comments welcome.
>
> /Marcus
>
> P.S.: @Evan: cc-ing you again to evtl. investigate delivery.
>