We are happy to announce that we have finished the initial version of our ActivityPub implementation. At the moment, it can only federate a limited set of data, like communities, users and posts, but not comments or votes. So this initial version is mainly interesting for those who are familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, and those who would like to contribute to Lemmy.
These are our test instances, Be aware that they are not permanent, and we might wipe the data at any time. Federation uses a whitelist for now, until we are confident that the implementation is secure.
If you are interested in contributing to the development, check out this issue and the dev instructions. Please use the issue tracker to report bugs, so that we can keep everything organized.
We also want to give a huge thanks to Aode, whose ActivityStreams library and advice have helped us immensely.
If you like what we are doing, please consider donating towards Lemmy development. Besides Liberapay and Patreon, we are also on OpenCollective now. Donations are a big help for us, because they allow us to spend more time to work on Lemmy, instead of selling our labour to a company just to pay for rent and other necessities.
How can I test this, I’m not able to post on the test instances.
I just created a user and posted on one of em, it should be working okay.
You have to register a new account, did you do that?
Will you be able to post cross-instance later?
Yes.
It says registration is closed. Tried on the first two of the list.
When did you try it? We forgot to open registrations when we posted the announcement, but now all of them have registrations open.
Maybe right immediately after the announcement, let me try again.
Works now. Seems I can’t subscribe to a federated community, only to a local one. How can I explore communities of a remote server? Or can I at least subscribe using a direct community address, such as
enterprise.lemmy.ml/news?You can subscribe, but its not handled by the UI yet. So you dont know if you are subscribed or not without checking the logs or db.
You can trigger a fetch for remote content by entering the url in the search. This also needs to be made more obvious.
This is why its an alpha ;)