Fediverse

As part of setting up backups for my own GoToSocial instance, I’ve contributed some additions to the GoToSocial CLI and its backup documentation. This will hopefully make setting up backups easier for others too. This post goes through the why of setting up backups for this in the first place and looks at two pending changes to GoToSocial to make backups easier. So why backup your Fediverse instance? Because of the signing keys that are stored in your database.

As I got into the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse I ended up hosting my own instance. Fediverse after all. But I wanted something I could easily operate and run which meant Mastodon was out and most Elixir-based solutions aren’t entirely simple to deploy and manage. Thankfully I stumbled across GoToSocial which is written in Go and has a fabulous community to boot. GoToSocial’s niche is small or single-user instances running on low-powered devices, like single-board computers or old laptops repurposed as home servers.

Thinking about the Fediverse a question that popped into my head was just how centralised the Fediverse is? By centralised I don’t mean the fact that mastodon.social is a huge instance, but centralised in the sense of which ISPs are hosting instances across the Fediverse. Mapping the Fediverse to Autonomous Systems The way this is achieved is technically speaking very simple: Query instances.social API for all instances it knows about Lookup the IP address(es) of each instance through DNS Use the MaxMind ASN database to find the AS number for the associated IP One problem is that this results in over 14k instances and for each one we do an A and AAAA query.

In this series of posts we’re going to explore ActivityPub, the protocol that powers microblogging across the Fediverse. This post is going to focus on how ActivityPub models microblogging. We’re going to dive into the three main parts: Actors, Activities and Objects. We’ll also take a look at how we use these to achieve microblogging in practice. Actor An Actor in ActivityPub is meant to represent someone or something performing an activity.

In this series of posts we’re going to explore ActivityPub, the protocol that powers microblogging across the Fediverse. This post is going to focus on the technologies ActivityPub is built upon. It doesn’t dive into how ActivityPub itself is used to provide interoperable microblogging. That will be the topic of a future entry. ⚠️ Caveat lector: This post has an air of mild annoyance 😑. If you don’t enjoy reading this type of commentary, I suggest you stop here.