Bridging the fediverse
A couple of years ago I started making an ActivityPub server to make it easy for me to access the fediverse over nntp.
One of the challenges - at least in the way I built my server - is that every server it talks to speaks a slightly different dialect of ActivityPub. Mastodon generates JSON with one structure, Pleroma might include a field that others don't, GotoSocial might leave one out, etc. etc.
Around a month ago Klaus lured me into trying the Bluesky↔Fediverse bridge Bridgy Fed. TechCrunch had a nice introduction on how to bridge your account, which I followed.
And then I had to adjust my ActivityPub server to the quirks of the bridge. Usually it's stuff like "this field I have only ever encountered having a string as the value, but now it's a dictionary, or a list", and it takes me a while to handle all of them.
Had I implemented the spec rather than just building something and trying it against other servers, I would probably have fewer of these surprises. But, hey, I was (and still am) building Illuminant for fun, so I was happy to implement just enough to interact.
One thing that in hindsight is sort of expected and also sort of a downer is that boosts and parent blueskidoos only show up if the sender's account is bridged. So rather than being a useful expanse of the fediverse, this bridging turns out - to me, anyway - to be more of a curiosity than anything else.
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