ActivityPub in Plone

I wonder if there is a plan to support ActivityPub in Plone, or if somebody is working on an add-on for it. WordPress and Drupal already have ActivityPub plugins.

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There is an integration to post to Mastodon, but not yet as with WP as a node in the Fediverse.

To my understanding, collective.mastodon acts as a Mastodon client (I guess that it uses the Mastodon REST API). I imagine that a package to make a Plone blog a Fediverse node should associate a collection (or folder) to an agent outbox, and capture replies to the collection elements in an inbox collection. This agent could be associated with a user (or group of users). Maybe it is not as simple to implement this feature.

This sounds like a plan :wink: who implements it?

Btw., there is already partially an infrastructure for the first part, currently for creating RSS/Atom feeds on folders/collections.

The better question is: why implement it :upside_down_face:
Do we have any reasonable real-world usecase?

Currently, many German agencies are using Mastodon. However, instead of publishing links to their website from a Mastodon account, they could have their news section accessible from Fediverse. For example, the German Aerospace Center (German Aerospace Center) is using Plone, and has a Mastodon account (DLR (@DLR@social.bund.de) - social.bund.de). This news Strahlungsdetektor M-42 fliegt zum Mond is also referred from mastodon DLR: "🚀 Der DLR Strahlungsdetektor M-42 ist heute an Bo…" - social.bund.de

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The why is another question. It is answered as soon as some organization or individual throws money or time at it. I personally would not recommend to turn a Plone (or any) website into a half baken fediverse server (that said I never had a look at the mentioned plugins for the other CMSes). I would post to Mastodon, Pixelfed, ... (depending on what fits best) and then use the fully supported server-software (own instance or some public one). As in the above example DLR uses the well maintained, official, and well suited social.bund.de

And we still have X :speak_no_evil:, there is Bluesky, there is Mastodon and there is Threads :see_no_evil:.
As a content producer, I would look into options for having a cross-posting service to which I would connect Plone (pushing content to the cross-posting service) :man_shrugging:t2:

Thank you for your answers. To me, each time a new protocol, data model, or paradigm appears, it is natural to think about how widely it can be applied. A long time ago, some people thought that XML could be used everywhere, but now JSON has displaced XML in some uses, and RDF in others. Regarding ActivityPub, I think it has the potential to grow and switch the communication paradigm. So, I wonder how it is being implemented in different content management systems.

A concrete use case is blogging. This is mainly the use case for WordPress. I found the ActivityPub plugin in WordPress quite useful because it allows for following and replying to posts beyond the WordPress system. So far, blog users have either relied on the commenting capabilities of their blogging system or used external services like DISQUS. Now, they can activate the ActivityPub plugins, and replies to blog posts can be made in other systems. I like the way that ActivityPub works. Of course, some blog owners may prefer the posts be created and stored in their content management system.

As it is usual for protocols and languages, the ActivityPub protocol may not fit all interactions. It may not be applicable to some particular communication workflows. Currently, it has limited support for groups and access control. The ActivityPub working group is discussing how to extend the protocol to support groups, but maybe some features will be excluded for the sake of simplicity. So, I don't think it will be suitable for all use cases, but it is still unclear to me which use cases it is not suitable for. That is the reason I appreciate your answers.

Regarding X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, they are platforms, so they are not comparable with ActivityPub. Actually, Mastodon implements ActivityPub, and Threads is in the process of supporting the protocol. I think that X owners have no intention to support ActivityPub, and I don't know about Bluesky.