⁂ Article

Seeking interop testing for geosocial ActivityPub client

Hey, all! I’m seeking some help testing an application I whipped up for the Geosocial task force of the W3C Social Web Community Group. It’s called https://checkin.swf.pub/ , and it’s a barebones checkin service, similar to Swarm, but implemented as a pure Web client. You can watch the application in action.

https://videopress.com/v/zCMu0OeZ?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

It logs into your account on an ActivityPub server using OAuth 2.0. It […]

Hey, all! I’m seeking some help testing an application I whipped up for the Geosocial task force of the W3C Social Web Community Group. It’s called https://checkin.swf.pub/ , and it’s a barebones checkin service, similar to Swarm, but implemented as a pure Web client. You can watch the application in action.

It logs into your account on an ActivityPub server using OAuth 2.0. It then reads your inbox, filtering the activities there to only show geosocial ones. You can use the geolocation services in the browser, and the places.pub service for a place vocabulary, to find nearby places. You can then “check in” to one of the places, with a note, and control of the privacy of the activity.

Geosocial activities are part of the core Activity Vocabulary that underlies ActivityPub. But, they’re not as widely implemented as other activities in the vocabulary. This app is trying to change that, by making them available on the network, and making it easy to create them.

To test the client, your service will need to support:

To test federation, your service will need to support:

As of this writing, Mastodon does not work for either of these. If you want to test receiving federated messages, follow me on evan@onepage.pub . I’ve been using it a lot!

Code for the checkin application is here: https://github.com/social-web-foundation/checkin

This is my second ActivityPub API client (ap, the command-line client, was my first), and my first one for the Web. I found this process really fun and invigorating. I was able to create a new kind of social networking application (well, new on the Fediverse…) purely from the client side. The app saves no data to the server; everything is done in the browser.

Please reach out on GitHub or comment here if you want to work on interoperability. I’m happy to help debug connections if needed.

@evanprodromou Here's how check-in activities look in Bonfire (not released yet)!

Happy to test check-out and travel activities too if you have examples to share.

We're tracking mockups and implementation progress here: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app/issues/1444

Would appreciate any feedback! 🙏
cc. @Jeremiah @herebox

@evanprodromou This is a fantastic idea, I was waiting for something like this!

I tried to log in, but it doesn't do anything, unfortunately. 🥲

Edit: Sometimes it helps to look at the original post. 😂
"As of this writing, Mastodon does not work for either of these. If you want to test receiving federated messages, follow me on evan@onepage.pub . I’ve been using it a lot!"
Got it!

@evanprodromou we did some initial testing in order to show places from places.pub on a map in bonfire. Proper previews for Arrive/Leave activities and the like should be straightforward to add.
Happy to continue testing and share progresses over the coming weeks. Let us know if there are specific scenarios you'd like us to explore :)

We'll (in this case Forte and the streams repository) send and receive Arrive and Leave and display them on a map if the coordinates are provided, but Travel hasn't yet been implemented; and doesn't make use of places.pub.

We let you provide any textual (edit: plus media, etc.) description, using your device's reported location; and "search nearby" is a function of every post that provides the coordinates.