Announcing Mitra Mini v0.1.0

Announcing Mitra Mini v0.1.0

Mitra Mini is an ActivityPub client that implements nomadic identity. It has become stable enough that I decided to cut the first release.

The basic features have been implemented: posts, reposts, likes. For more information, check the project's readme:

minimitra

minimitra - Headless ActivityPub client

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

It all started nearly four years ago with a vague idea that linking cryptographic keys to #ActivityPub actors could unlock decentralized identity in Fediverse. Eventually, the solution was discovered, and implemented by several projects, but these implementations were servers, not clients. Now there is finally a client, and the design has been proven to work well.

#NomadicIdentity

@silverpill oooh, this is intriguing, I will have to read more into it! Nice work

@taoeffect It is useful if you want a micro-blog account that is not tied to a single server / domain name.

@Floppy Thanks!

@taoeffect There is a caveat, of course. It can communicate with Mastodon and other Fediverse servers, but only a few of them are capable of distinguishing decentralized accounts from regular ones.

@silverpill what's the entry point for trying this out? consuming portable objects?

@toddsundsted You mean, the entry point for a developer? I started with consuming

Congrats!

Thank you @rimu !

@silverpill thanks! yes, as a developer. i'd love to see this in action.

@toddsundsted You can look up @minimitra, it is an actor hosted on my server and managed using the Mitra Mini client.

Its ID is a normal HTTP URI (compatible form). The first step is to convert this ID into canonical form ('ap' URI), so if this actor moves to another server, your software will be able to tell that it is dealing with the same actor. This trick also works with posts, activities, everything.

At the next difficulty level you can create portable actors. This shouldn't require major changes if you keep signing keys on the server. Not ideal, but okay for single-user instances.

Finally, there is client-side signing. This is really hard, and it is probably easier to develop a client from scratch than trying to adapt an existing codebase.