Continuing Mandy: most valuable next steps?

Architecture Spritely Goblins
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I’ve been wondering, and I figure this is as good a place as any to ask… if someone (maybe me) wanted to build on the work that @tsyesika has done on Mandy so far, what would be the most valuable thing to work on next?

(Not including things that the Spritely core team is already working on, to be clear - persistence will need sleepy actors but let’s assume those have already made it into a Goblins release.)

I know there’s probably a lot to unpack here but a full implementation with federation would have to understand JSON-LD to make sure it was interpreting incoming activities/objects properly, right? (In theory, anyway…) I had been looking at the JSON-LD spec/algorithms and was somewhat intimidated by the amount of work potentially involved there without an existing json-ld library to use. But I had forgotten that @cwebber wrote pubstrate in Guile, and just noticed that it has a guile json-ld implementation! Would it be worthwhile to try and pull that into Mandy?

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Hey jfred! I think Mandy would be a really cool project to see pushed forward. I basically only scratched the surface and built a basic prototype I built. I think there’s a lot of research left to do (how do deal with the server-to-server federated parts). There are also lots of just missing pieces from the prototype. JSON-LD is certainly one of them, but so is supporting much more of activitystreams 2, activitypub itself, authentication, etc.

You are right though, the implementation should understand JSON-LD and not just treat everything as pure JSON, so adding support for that would be really useful. I also find the JSON-LD spec a bit intimidating, certainly snarfing what we can from pubstrate makes sense I think.

This is a long winded way of saying there’s a lot of work to do so pulling at any of the threads would be good. I’m excited to see Mandy progress from just a prototype to a useful AP implementation.

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