Federation Compatibility

[Kelson Vibber]

I've set up a test instance of Postmarks, and tried linking it up with various other Fediverse accounts I have. I was only able to get following to work - in either direction - with Mastodon.

I tried following the Postmarks account with: GoToSocial, Takahe, Snac2, Firefish, and Akkoma. Some could find the Postmarks profile when I searched for it, but couldn't follow it.

I also tried following each of those, plus a Lemmy user, from Postmarks. Again, Mastodon was the only one that succeeded.

It's late right now, so I wanted to just get the issue written down, but I'll gather some debug info when I get a chance.

[Andy Piper]

Tracking this, thanks for reporting. FWIW the initial ActivityPub piece of this Postmarks was based on https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub and there may be some upstream improvements this repo could benefit from, otherwise¹ features e.g. nodeinfo support and others have been grafted in as it has evolved.

• I've just successfully tested following a Postmarks instance/user from Shuttlecraft (another single-user AP instance), but I'm unable to follow the Shuttlecraft user from Postmarks.

[2023-9-21 9:9:21] POST:/admin/following/follow 200 0.006ms
Unexpected token N in JSON at position 0

• I was able to successfully follow a Bookwyrm user from Postmarks, and the Postmarks user from Bookwyrm.

• Attempting to follow a PixelFed user results in:

[2023-9-21 9:16:46] POST:/admin/following/follow 200 0.003ms
Couldn't find inbox at supplied profile url https://metapixl.com/users/forgeandcraft

An inbound follow from PixelFed works.

• Attempting to follow a Takahe user results in:

[2023-9-21 9:17:56] POST:/admin/following/follow 200 0.002ms
couldn't look up canonical actor info
Invalid URL

• Attempting to follow a Lemmy user results in:

[2023-9-21 9:43:58] POST:/admin/following/follow 200 0.004ms
couldn't look up canonical actor info
Invalid URL

I'm fairly sure that some of these are due to #77 and the usernames including a leading @ (or not).

Footnotes

1. Irrelevant as it looks like the codebases implement the same AP features at this point ↩

[Steve Bate]

What do you think about creating a wiki page with a table showing the federation status for various platforms? I'd be willing to help track down issues, as time permits.

[Andy Piper]

Yep, that's probably what we need to do here! I think only @ckolderup currently has the ability to do that on the wiki here for now.

[Casey Kolderup]

thanks @kvibber for opening this up, this is definitely something that would be great to improve. And I just opened a separate issue #128 to do some more meta-discussion about permissions, project organization, and governance 🙀

[Jeff Sikes]

Just adding some notes I've seen while testing. These are all inbound follows.

Other postmarks users
Always seems to work.

Mastodon
Always seems to work for me.

Firefish and IceShrimp
A follow request never reaches the Postmarks server, it just spins as "Processing" on the servers and at least I never see it in the Postmarks logs.

Friendica
Friendica is reporting a valid follow, but on Postmarks it doesn't go through. I see in the postmarks logs this message:
Error: Couldn't find inbox at supplied profile url https://venera.social/profile/box464

GoToSocial
I have my own GtS instance and it's running on the same docker container as Postmarks. So this is easy to test. Unfortunately I don't see this 400 exception in the Postmark logs. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong spot.

timestamp="22/10/2023 21:19:40.929" func=httpclient.(*Client).DoSigned level=INFO method=POST url=https://bookmarks.box464.com/api/inbox requestID=y2pn8pmb04001pz7hv00 pubKeyID=https://gts.scoobysnack.net/users/zoinks/main-key msg="performing request"

timestamp="22/10/2023 21:19:40.935" func=workers.(*Processor).EnqueueClientAPI.func1 level=ERROR requestID=y2pn8pmb04001pz7hv00 msg="error processing client API message: CreateFollowReq: error federating follow: Follow: error sending activity *typefollow.ActivityStreamsFollow via outbox https://gts.scoobysnack.net/users/zoinks/outbox: func1: error delivering to https://bookmarks.box464.com/api/inbox: deliver: POST request to https://bookmarks.box464.com/api/inbox failed: status=\"400 Bad Request\" body=\"Bad Request\""

Pixelfed
Pixelfed shows a successful follow, but really the Postmark site isn't getting it? I don't see any logs at least.

[Andy Piper]

Related - #185
Looking into some of these issues now.

[Kelson Vibber]

Possibly relevant error log entry for GoToSocial:

timestamp="23/02/2024 06:02:10.222" func=dereferencing.(*Dereferencer).RefreshAccount level=ERROR requestID=ba9rxn4d04001yfkypbg msg="error enriching remote account: enrichAccount: error dereferencing https://bookmarks.kvibber.com/u/interesting: Dereference: non activity streams response: application/json; charset=utf-8"

It looks like another case where GoToSocial is more strictly enforcing the spec than most AP software. It may be expecting one of these types for the response:

application/activity+json
application/activity+json; charset=utf-8
application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"

[Kelson Vibber]

Progress!

I changed the content-type and accept in signature.js to application/activity+json, and then I followed @andypiper 's suggestion in #191 and patched user.js to add

res.type('application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"');

to the actor response, and now my GoToSocial instance is able to retrieve my Postmarks profile.

Following doesn't work yet. The log entry on the GTS side:

timestamp="07/05/2024 21:48:24.799" func=workers.(*clientAPI).CreateFollowReq level=ERROR requestID=sg08gnmf04001j7fztgg msg="error federating follow request: Follow: error sending activity *typefollow.ActivityStreamsFollow via outbox https://notes.kvibber.com/users/kelson/outbox: func1: error delivering to https://bookmarks.kvibber.com/api/inbox: deliver: POST request to https://bookmarks.kvibber.com/api/inbox failed: status=\"400 Bad Request\" body=\"Bad Request\""