

ActivityPub messages are not encrypted, but they could be signed. Signing doesn’t prevent edits and deletes.
Yes, if someone has unsubscribed they are unlikely to be notified about the deletion.
Developer of ActivityPub-based micro-blogging and content subscription platform Mitra. Working on Fediverse standards: https://codeberg.org/silverpill/feps


ActivityPub messages are not encrypted, but they could be signed. Signing doesn’t prevent edits and deletes.
Yes, if someone has unsubscribed they are unlikely to be notified about the deletion.


As I understand it ActivityPub uses a combination of push notifications at time of publishing and pull notifications at time of subscription/query for objects?
It’s a mix of pushing and pulling. When something happens, the server pushes a notification (“activity”) to other servers. But recipients often need to pull additional data, such as user profiles or related posts.
Duration of caching is set by the instance admin I take it?
Yes, and it also depends on the software. Some applications may keep cached objects forever and only prune cached media (because objects don’t require much space).
Regarding Authorship, if there wasn’t an issue then ATProtocol devs wouldn’t have made it the cornerstone feature of their network
Moving in ActivityPub world is difficult because authorship is tied to a specific server. We can solve this problem by using cryptographic identities and signing everything, like ATProto and Nostr do.
I’d like to know how delete requests propagate, when the “Object” is deleted does a request to clear cache go out to all federating instances?
Deletes and edits are usually sent to followers of a user or a community. Delivering them to all known instances is not practical.


The main advantage is efficiency. You don’t need to poll 1000 servers every minute to get fresh content because everything is delivered straight to your inbox.
the cost of broad redundancy of content and authorship issues
ActivityPub doesn’t have redundancy or authorship issues. An object only exists on the originating sever, other servers merely cache it. This is not different from what RSS readers do, for example.


I think Solid had some interesting ideas, but was ruined by Linked Data.
ActivityPub has a chance of evolving into something like Solid, but better.
Actually, I am already using a single account for interacting with most Fediverse apps. Aren’t you on Mbin? I thought it also can interact with blogs, forums and everything in between


I would like to use a single account for everything, rather than separate accounts for different kinds of content. A server that works like super-app.


I don’t like the idea, but at least one such application is already being developed:


FEP-ef61: Portable Objects describes how to use DIDs with ActivityPub. Here’s a slightly less technical introduction: https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/nomadpub.md
It’s not easy, though. Adding this feature to an existing project will require a lot of work, especially if you don’t want to share signing keys with servers. This was discussed in #3100, Lemmy devs are not opposed to FEP-ef61, but they don’t plan to work on it.
Also, I don’t recommend copying solutions from ATProto, their did:plc and did:web are not really “decentralized”.


@Fitik @Teknevra Tipping will also be supported in the future (in addition to subscriptions).
And people on other platforms may put addresses in profile fields (Lemmy doesn’t have them yet?). Mitra displays a donation icon when address is detected (the name of the field should be like $BTC).
You can find some interoperability data here: https://funfedi.dev/support/_tables/
More applications could be added, there are open issues for PeerTube and Lemmy.