Bridgy Fed

Got an IndieWeb site? Want to interact with federated social networks like Mastodon, Hubzilla, and more? Bridgy Fed is for you.

https://fed.brid.gy/

Bridgy Fed connects the IndieWeb with federated social networks using ActivityPub and OStatus. Original design docs:

• https://snarfed.org/indieweb-activitypub-bridge
• https://snarfed.org/indieweb-ostatus-bridge

License: This project is placed in the public domain.

Development

You'll need Python 3. Install the Google Cloud SDK (aka gcloud) with the gcloud-appengine-python and gcloud-appengine-python-extras components. Then, run:

python3 -m venv local
source local/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Now, run the tests to check that everything is set up ok:

gcloud beta emulators datastore start --no-store-on-disk --consistency=1.0 --host-port=:8089 < /dev/null >& /dev/null &
python3 -m unittest discover

Finally, run this in the repo root directory to start the web app locally:

GAE_ENV=localdev FLASK_ENV=development flask run -p 8080

If you send a pull request, please include (or update) a test for the new functionality!

If you hit an error during setup, check out the oauth-dropins Troubleshooting/FAQ section. For searchability, here are a handful of error messages that have solutions there:

bash: ./bin/easy_install: ...bad interpreter: No such file or directory

ImportError: cannot import name certs

ImportError: No module named dev_appserver

ImportError: cannot import name tweepy

File ".../site-packages/tweepy/auth.py", line 68, in _get_request_token
  raise TweepError(e)
TweepError: must be _socket.socket, not socket

error: option --home not recognized

You may need to change granary, oauth-dropins, mf2util, or other dependencies as well as as Bridgy Fed. To do that, clone their repo locally, then install them in "source" mode with e.g.:

pip uninstall -y granary
pip install -e <path to granary>

To deploy to the production instance on App Engine - if @snarfed has added you as an owner - run:

gcloud -q beta app deploy --no-cache --project bridgy-federated *.yaml

Compatibility

Here are in progress notes on how I'm testing interoperability with various federated social networks.

ActivityPub

• Mastodon (issue) works! They shipped support in 1.6.
  • [email protected], example post
• Hubzilla is getting close!
  • Old since lastauth.com is down now: ~~[email protected], example post~~
• distbin
  • No explicit accounts, can post anything as anyone
• pump.io
  • [email protected]
  • Tried posting a bunch of ways, couldn't get any to work :/
• Kroeg
  • Not open to other users yet. Seems to be running at puckipedia.com/social.
• Pleroma
  • [email protected]

OStatus / Salmon

• Friendica
  • [email protected]
  • Example post: HTML (alternate link), Atom
  • Atom has Salmon link rel, author.dfrn:handle is user URI (dfrn is http://purl.org/macgirvin/dfrn/1.0))
• GNU Social (née StatusNet)
  • [email protected]
  • Example post: HTML, Atom
  • Atom has no Salmon link rels! author.name is username (snarfed)
• Hubzilla
  • [email protected]
  • Example post: HTML
  • Only has Atom link rel="alternate" for full feed, not individual post :/
  • Atom feed has Salmon link rels inside top level feed, not in individual entrys
  • Atom entries have author.name as username (snarfed)

Stats

I occasionally generate stats and graphs of usage and growth via BigQuery, like I do with Bridgy. Here's how.

1. Export the full datastore to Google Cloud Storage. Include all entities except MagicKey. Check to see if any new kinds have been added since the last time this command was run.

   gcloud datastore export --async gs://bridgy-federated.appspot.com/stats/ --kinds Follower,Response
   

   Note that --kinds is required. From the export docs:

   Data exported without specifying an entity filter cannot be loaded into BigQuery.

2. Wait for it to be done with gcloud datastore operations list | grep done.

3. Import it into BigQuery:

   for kind in Follower Response; do
     bq load --replace --nosync --source_format=DATASTORE_BACKUP datastore.$kind gs://bridgy-federated.appspot.com/stats/all_namespaces/kind_$kind/all_namespaces_kind_$kind.export_metadata
   done
   

4. Check the jobs with bq ls -j, then wait for them with bq wait.

5. Run the full stats BigQuery query. Download the results as CSV.

6. Open the stats spreadsheet. Import the CSV, replacing the data sheet.

7. Check out the graphs! Save full size images with OS or browser screenshots, thumbnails with the Download Chart button.