Ask HN: What would it take for HN to become ActivityPub compatible?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36924623

by breakingcups • 3 years ago

10 7 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I started following an HN repost bot on Mastodon this morning.

What's missing is comments from AP being ingested/posted to HN, the upvote/downvote federation story, and the moderation story.

Has @dang commented on this question in the past? Has anyone shown a potential HN source patch?

Where is the HN source code right now? Free and Open?

mdwalters• 3 years ago

last time i heard, the source code is avalible as a zip archive hosted on hacker news, i don't remember the url, but someone has uploaded it to github

krapp• 3 years ago

Where is the HN source code right now? Free and Open?

Yes and no.

HN itself is running a proprietary fork of Arc Lisp, which you can find here[0]. The Arc maintainters don't take public PRs or feature requests, and HN itself has numerous changes to the codebase which aren't public for business reasons.

There is a public fork of Arc called Anarki[1] which has no direct connection to HN or Arc Lisp, and for which the community and development is... well... anarchic.

And given the general culture here around minimalism and stasis (not wanting to introduce new features for fear of entropy that would negatively affect the signal to noise ratio and push the site towards Eternal September) chances are any large, publicly visible changes to the codebase aren't going to happen. People here riot if they change the stylesheets just a bit too much. Heaven help us if something imports content from beyond the AT field that Hacker News keeps between itself and the unwashed masses.

But dang's email is at the bottom of the page if you want to ask him.

Honestly, as with most such questions regarding HN, the preferred answer is probably to just write a third party client that uses the HN API and let HN stay what it is.

[0]http://arclanguage.org/

[1]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

And given the general culture here around minimalism and stasis (not wanting to introduce new features for fear of entropy that would negatively affect the signal to noise ratio and push the site towards Eternal September) chances are any large, publicly visible changes to the codebase aren't going to happen. People here riot if they change the stylesheets just a bit too much. Heaven help us if something imports content from beyond the AT field that Hacker News keeps between itself and the unwashed masses.

As strict as it seems, history seems to have vindicated this policy.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

What would it take for HN to become ActivityPub compatible?

I do not foresee this happening. The moderation and voting would require a significant level of trust of the other instances, admins and moderators. Being associated with other multi-media sites introduces legal risks I would be surprised if a VC was willing to take on. Assuming you mean a bi-directional integration into ActivityPub

That said one could run something like HN and moderate it independently. Maybe Postmill [1a][1b]. There are other sites that ingest data from HN's API [2] for search, statistical analytics, etc... Something similar could probably be done that would be ingested read-only into ActivityPub from another site but I would be quite surprised to see this site implement ActivityPub directly. I don't know what the API rate limits are for this site or if Mastodon could operate within them.

[1a] - https://postmill.xyz/

[1b] - https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill

[2] https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Shawnj2• 3 years ago

One directional ActivityPub is probably worth doing where people can follow HN from Mastodon but can’t contribute.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

I somewhat remember there being some ok nntp/Usenet mirroring pieces of software. Those probably do a ton of work to mirror the threads here well!

I'd start with that, and then just build something that spins out feeds of each user.

Ask HN: What would it take for HN to become ActivityPub compatible?

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