Someone who only has programming basics is a beginner. ActivityPub is not a simple spec to implement.

Of course it's an unpopular opinion among the vehemently anti-AI crowd over here, but you can get a pretty good headstart with LLMs, local ones even.

The thing is that you don't just take what is given and immediately craft a PR out of it. Code review it, figure out what works and what doesn't, have a test plan, have unit tests, stand up a sandbox and look at the frontend results, etc.

Hell, if you aren't spending at least the first several hours asking questions and crafting a complete design plan, you're not doing it right.

Here is what I originally wrote

Thanks.

1. You could've copy pasted that here. It's much easier to read than a screenshot and people can also search for it.
2. That text is to convince somebody who knows how federation could be useful to the platform, but it doesn't answer my original questions:

• what exactly should be federated?
• which problems could be faced?
• how could they be resolved?

I don't know much about fan-fiction, but I imagine it works like this:

• there are members of the platform
• every member can publish their own text
• every member can rate another text and leave comments behind

Do publications have to go into a certain communities? If so, that would translate very well to communities on lemmy. Otherwise it would be more of a blog-like thing.

Regardless of how they are published, how would content from other servers show up on the fan fiction server? This post for example, how would that show up on the fan fiction server? If it shouldn't how would it be filtered out and does the Activity Pub thing allow for some kind filtering?

Then we get to ratings: lemmy has upvotes and downvotes, mastodon has... stars? How would that translate to fan fiction ratings? Can servers change their rating systems? 1-5, 1-10, 1-100? How would you solve that?

A fan fiction server shouldn't all of a sudden start seeing posts from !politics or from pixelfed, I imagine. Then it wouldn't be fan fiction anymore.

You have to come up with a fleshed out suggestion. I don't believe you need to understand every technical detail, but you need to conceptually try and understand the different platforms and think what it would mean for them to communicate with each other. With that, you will have a point of discussion for the developers of the fan fiction server's software.

Are you trying to build a federated version of AO3? Most of the fanfic writers I know spend there time there, but it is currently down - maybe this is in response to the suspected hack and anticipated recovery time?

I was trying to, although I haven't found much luck.

Although I did stumble upon Ourchive

It would surprise me if there isn't already an implementation that can be adapted. E.g. as someone said, Mastodon uses Rails .

Adapt is the wrong word, you can't just plug Mastodon into the side of this other app. At best someone could learn and borrow from the Mastodon implementation. And that's still not a beginner level challenge.

Unless you are willing to hire a skilled developer

Unfortunately, I happen to be broke

I meant see what AP (Activitypub) aimplementation Mastodon is using, and adapt that implementation, not the entirety of Mastodon. In fact quick web search immediately finds there are multiple pre-packaged Ruby gems for Activitypub, so just use one.

I looked at the Wikipedia article about AP and it's kind of bureaucratic but I don't see much difficult. Yeah it's not suited to a raw beginning programmer but it shouldn't take a big expert. OP, have you done much programming?

I see on Wikipedia that there's a new thing called "AT Protocol" that's supposed to improve on AP. That might also be worth looking into.