Idle thought re: account delegation

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

I’ve been toying with the idea of using OAuth2/OpenID and the C2S API to have a service act on behalf of another instance (e.g. act on Lemmy, post as Mastodon account)

But now I’m wondering whether that kind of complexity is needed… one could theoretically register a public key to the instance it is acting on behalf of, and simply sign activities using the ID of the other server… Second server would need only update the actor with the new public key for verification purposes…

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@julian have you read this?

https://evanp.me/2024/04/22/cross-server-interactions-in-activitypub/

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@julian tl;dr all you need is OAuth 2.0. It's easy with this FEP:

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/d8c2/fep-d8c2.md

I think it's great to hear you're going to implement the ActivityPub API. Chapter 3 of my book covers it pretty well. I strongly recommend reading it!

https://evanp.me/activitypub-book/

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

evan@cosocial.ca no, I haven’t read that actually! I did now and I’m feeling a bit reassured that I came to the same solution, although it’s currently high level and theoretical.

That there’s an FEP written for it is great as well. Are there any existing implementations of this FEP?

As an aside, my forum hadn’t seen your post before, so when it pulled it in it automatically back filled all of the comments too, because pfefferle@mastodon.social added support for 7888/f228 awhile back! Neat to see it outside of a testing context (no pun intended) heheh.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@julian @pfefferle onepage.pub uses it, the ap command-line tool uses the FEP. The new checkin tool I'm working on uses it. It'd be great to see more implementations.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

evan@cosocial.ca that’s cool, so hopefully I’ll have something to test against besides another NodeBB server