Owner decision of 2026-10-06 (G-0009, FEP-400e). A persona's actor names its wall (…/graffiti, sm:wall) and, in
Smithereen's privacySettings, that its followers may write on it. A public post that is not a reply, sent with the wall
as its target by an account following the persona, is hosted: the persona is notified, it reaches the persona's and its
followers' homes, and the followers' servers and the author's are told with Add{Note}. The persona deletes it with
DELETE /api/v1/statuses/:id, which sends Remove{Note}; Smithereen deletes the post then. The wall lists the persona's
public posts that start a thread and what was written on it.
Elsewhere: an account's Add{Note} on its own wall shows the post to its followers here as on that wall (privapub.wall on
the status), and its Remove takes it away. An Add or Remove naming a collection of the account's own server PrivaPub
does not know has its document read again first, at most hourly: accounts kept before walls were read had none.
Checked live: Smithereen 40 checks (G-0009 closed); GoToSocial and Mastodon unchanged (121).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Federation:Relays names relays by their actor (or inbox) address; the instance actor follows Public at each, as Mastodon
subscribes, a minute after start and every six hours (asked again a day after no answer or a refusal, undone when a
relay is no longer named). What an accepted relay passes on comes to the federated timeline and nobody's home: a public
post it forwards (Activity-Relay), read again from its origin like any forwarded post, and a post it announces
(aode-relay), kept as its author's and never as the relay's boost. Nothing of a persona's is sent to a relay; sending
public posts there waits for the owner.
The pasture gains both relays (peers/relay.sh, peers/aoderelay.sh) and scenarios/relay.sh, 13 checks. The village
backlog is clean: 2574 checks pass, one known gap (Misskey's).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Two owner decisions of 2026-10-05, both recorded in ROADMAP:
- After a verified Move the personas following the old account follow the new one, in the same lists, and a mute or
block of the old account carries over, as Mastodon does it.
- A direct message to one account on a server whose NodeInfo names Lemmy before 1.0 or Mbin goes as a ChatMessage,
the one place PrivaPub decides by a server's software (invariant 17). G-0008 is closed.
Mbin addresses its private messages to the recipient's profile page, so a Create addressed to a persona's /@name now
reaches the persona. Checked live: moves 8/8, Lemmy 0.19 30/30, Mbin 26/26 with messages both ways. The software
theory runs alone, since every test's peer shares 127.0.0.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Mbin 1.10.1 runs in the pasture (its image, a messenger worker, a RabbitMQ
of its own, its API limits raised), and peers/mbin_token.py gets mbuser's
token through the authorization-code flow. scenarios/mbin.sh: 24 checks and
one known gap, magazines both ways, titled threads, a Note to a magazine as
a microblog post, comments, favourites and upvotes both ways, a moderator's
lock, unlock and removal, the unfollow and statistics.
What it showed:
- Mbin sends a magazine's threads to its subscribers as the author's Create,
the magazine as its audience, never announced. A post whose group is
followed here and lives on the post's own server is now kept as if
announced; the same from another server is not.
- A moderator's lock is a bare Lock (and Undo{Lock}): LockHandler takes it
from the post's own server only.
- Mbin takes private messages only as ChatMessage and its actors say
nothing about it; PrivaPub never decides by a server's software, so this
stays open as G-0008 for the owner.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Two owner decisions of 2026-10-05, recorded in the roadmap.
Replies passed on ("the fediverse is broken without"): a public or unlisted
reply from another server to a persona's public, unlisted or followers-only
post goes on to the persona's followers as its author's server sent it, as
Mastodon forwards it, never to the replier's own server, never for a
local-only or group post; its edit and deletion follow. Only an activity its
own actor delivered is passed on (Arrival.Raw), so nothing forwarded is
forwarded again. The town checks it as relay.reply cells (specs/relay-five:
882 checks pass); Mastodon takes a passed-on activity only with an LD
signature, which GoToSocial and Akkoma don't add, and the checker knows it.
Events: a persona joins another server's event with a Join and leaves it with
a Leave, both to the organiser only, through
POST /api/privapub/v1/statuses/:id/join|leave; the organiser's Accept or
Reject is routed by our join id and shows as privapub.event.participation.
Events by invitation or taken on another site are refused before anything
is sent. Mobilizon's scenario joins and leaves an event (28 checks) and keeps
one for decePubClient's e2e.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A remote post's canReply, canLike and canAnnounce (with the older always and approvalRequired) are kept beside
canQuote and judged for each persona: let in at once when the rule names the public, the persona, the author's
followers while it follows the author, or the accounts the author follows while the author follows it; asked first
when only the manual list names it; refused (422) otherwise. Asked first, a ReplyRequest, LikeRequest or
AnnounceRequest with the interaction as its instrument goes to the author alone, and the interaction waits
(privapub.approval: pending). The author's Accept brings an authorization, verified on the author's origin as naming the
interaction and the post; the reply then goes out with replyAuthorization, the boost with announceAuthorization, the
like with likeAuthorization. A Reject leaves the reply ours alone and takes a like or a boost back. As a third party, a
reply a policy does not let in at once is kept only with an authorization that verifies. Clients see the rules as
GoToSocial's interaction_policy.
Checked live against GoToSocial 0.22.1: the scenario's nine new checks pass (64 in all), a reply and a like approved
through its interaction requests and a boost refused.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Mobilizon's organiser sends the Create, Update and Delete of an event attributed to the group, which announces the
Event itself. PrivaPub refused the organiser's activities as misattributed (400) and kept the event through the
group's Announce, so an edit was lost and a deletion left the event in place. An object attributed to another account
of the actor's own server is now that server's to vouch for: created or edited as the server has it, under the account
it is attributed to, and deleted once the server answers 404 or 410. Attributed to an account elsewhere, it is still
refused. Checked against Mobilizon 5.2.4 in the pasture.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A thread's server passes on what happens in it, signed with its own key: Mastodon forwards the replies to its
accounts' posts and their deletions, Friendica every activity in its threads. PrivaPub answered them 401, which also
tells a sender its signature failed. Now they get 202 and nothing in them is believed: a forwarded Create or Update is
taken as its object reads at the actor's origin, a Delete of a public or unlisted copy once that origin answers 404 or
410 (RemoteActorService.IsGone; FederationHttp remembers the status of a refusal), anything else is let go, and our own
activities coming back are ignored. A forwarded copy has its own dedupe key, so one that failed never hides the
author's own delivery.
A reply in the thread of someone followed here is kept, as Mastodon keeps them. Mastodon delivers a reply to the
followers of the account it answers; PrivaPub dropped those as unaddressed, which the pasture showed: the outsider's
reply its Mastodon scenario said was never delivered had been, and was thrown away.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
/api/v1/conversations answered one page, never unread, its read endpoint
did nothing, and DELETE was missing; each conversation cost a query per
member. Now each conversation keeps its newest post (DmGroup.LastPostId,
set as posts arrive, learnt once by migration _013) and pages by it as
Mastodon does, and each persona's ConversationState holds what it read and
what it took off its list:
- unread when someone else wrote last, after what the persona read;
- read marks it so, and writing in a conversation reads it;
- DELETE takes it off the list until a newer message brings it back.
The list reads its states, newest posts, members and accounts in a few
queries per page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A comment in a community was announced only as Announce{Create}, which
Akkoma, Mastodon and Misskey drop: their members never saw it (the village
found Akkoma's missing). A comment is now also announced as itself, as a
new post already was; Lemmy answers that form 400, harmlessly. Nothing is
decided by the follower's software.
The town's checker expects a followers-only quote to stay with the
followers, and G-0003 covers only Lemmy-hosted communities (their relayed
moderation), since relayed likes count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Owner decision 2026-10-04: fix the mismatches and every other mismatch of the same kind.
- One counting rule (Domain/Privacy/Counted), Mastodon's. It is used for a persona's statuses_count, its outbox
totalItems, NodeInfo localPosts and the instance status_count, which used to count four different things. It
counts every post that is neither deleted nor a DM, boosts included, and circle and located posts too (owner
decision). A group's count includes its remote members' posts.
- Users. Personas of banned or deleted roots no longer count, and are not found in search. NodeInfo now gives
activeMonth and activeHalfyear, and the v2 instance gives active_month instead of a constant 0.
- replies_count counts only public and unlisted replies, so it no longer tells anyone that a private reply exists.
Migration _012 recounts it.
- A remote account that deletes itself takes everything out of every count (GoneActors): its likes, downvotes,
reactions and poll votes go and their counters come back, as do its boosts', replies' and quotes' counts, and its
notifications. Lookups, account lists, search and favourited_by no longer show it. Migration _012 applies this to
accounts already gone.
- Deleting a post also deletes its pins and the local boosts of it.
- /stalking gives the same total as following_count. Members are still never listed, and hide_collections is now
always true, since the setting never did anything.
- Joining a community by invitation is following it, so /flock and /groupies agree; leaving unfollows.
- Search. Anyone may search, as on Mastodon; resolve and offset need a sign-in, offset pages, and deleted accounts
are never found.
- notifications/unread_count counts what the list shows, and the owner's follower and following lists page with
Link.
- The instance API advertises what is enforced:
- max_characters, now enforced with a 422;
- max_pinned_statuses = MaxPins;
- the media types and limits MediaService and MediaOptions accept;
- PollService's limits;
- the configured languages;
- no streaming URL until streaming exists.
domain_count counts the servers we have exchanged with; which ones stays unpublished (peers is empty).
- Routes Mastodon answers now answer instead of 404:
- directory, tags/{name}, timelines/link and identity_proofs;
- instance/languages, translation_languages, domain_blocks and privacy_policy;
- the v1 and v2 notification policy, and notification requests.
Also, from phase 3: a recovered password ends /clientapi sessions through a per-root SessionStamp claim instead of
comparing the JWT's whole-second nbf with the change time. That comparison let a token issued in the same second
survive, which made a test flaky.
671 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Arrival carries a verdict that handlers set with one line before an existing return
(Arrival.Drop, Reject, Accept, About), so no handler signature changes. InboxProcessor
records it as an 'in' event, with the time taken, the wait since the inbox accepted it, the
attempt, the audience (from the post's visibility, or else the activity's addressing), the
local actor kind, the object's age for updates, deletes and reactions, and the FEP features
of a delivered object. It also records types nothing handles (unknown-type), actors that
cannot be loaded (deferred) and handler failures.
Drop reasons: fetch-failed, unparseable, misattributed, duplicate, deleted, not-addressed,
not-followed, not-public, not-visible, not-deleted, unknown-object, unknown-recipient,
cross-origin, unsupported. Accepted sub-reasons: stored, poll-vote, edit, refresh,
actor-refresh, actor-delete, removed, tombstone-only, auto-accepted, pending,
follow-answer, quote-answer, quote-granted, undone, reaction, reported. Rejected: blocked,
ignored, quote-refused.
A circle's traffic is private and kindless, and a stranger posting into one is just
not-addressed, so the event store cannot reveal a circle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
- Received quotes: read from `quote`, `quoteUrl`, `quoteUri`, `_misskey_quote` or a FEP-e232 Link tag; the quoted post
is fetched once; a quoteAuthorization stamp is verified field by field on the quoted author's origin; a consent
quote without a stamp is pending; an older-key quote of a public post is shown; Delete of a stamp revokes. Counts
and a `quote` notification follow the accepted state. The `quote-inline` fallback survives sanitising and is removed
from content when the real quote is shown.
- Personas quote through `quoted_status_id`: posts that state a quote policy get a QuoteRequest and stay pending until
an Accept brings a stamp we can verify, then an Update adds quoteAuthorization; posts that state none are quoted
the older way, without `quote`; another persona's posts cannot be quoted yet (we issue no stamps). Quoting posts
are delivered to the quoted author too.
- Mastodon API: Status.quote (with the quoted status one level deep), quotes_count, quote_approval from the remote
policy, GET /api/v1/statuses/:id/quotes, `quote` notifications, and api_versions.mastodon = 7.
Checked live: GoToSocial's author-only quote policy is respected.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
- A public post that links to a page gets a preview card: from the post's own data first (FEP-8967 Link preview, the
object's image, title and summary); otherwise the server reads the page once, 0-60 s after the post arrives, never
when someone reads it. OpenGraph and Twitter tags give title, description and image; one LinkPreview per address
is cached for 7 days and shared by the whole server, so a fetch never points at a persona.
- Lemmy link posts, which carry no title or description, get them filled in.
- The page fetch uses the guarded client (public addresses, three redirects, HTML only, first 512 KB).
- Federation:FetchLinkPreviews switches page fetching off.
- Local public posts get cards too.
Checked live: a link to a GoToSocial profile page becomes a card with its title, description and proxied image.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
- Custom emoji (Emoji tags) on posts, display names, bios and profile fields, at most 64 per object, proxied, in
Status.emojis and Account.emojis.
- Remote profiles keep their header, profile fields, locked flag, published date, movedTo, indexable, memorial and
image descriptions (a locked GoToSocial account no longer shows as open).
- Polls: incoming Questions (Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, GoToSocial shapes) with counts, voters, end and closed;
our own polls from the Mastodon API go out as Questions; votes in are counted once per voter and never become
replies; personas vote on other servers' polls with one Note per choice; counts refresh with an Update at most every
three minutes; a poll closes on time and tells its voters and its author. GET /api/v1/polls/:id and POST
/api/v1/polls/:id/votes.
- An Update without a newer `updated` only refreshes poll, video, audio and event details and leaves no revision.
Checked live against GoToSocial: each side's poll reaches the other as a poll and each side's vote is counted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
- Dislike and its Undo are kept as downvotes (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, Friendica) and shown with favourites as votes.
- ChatMessage (Lemmy 0.19, Mbin, PieFed to those two) arrives as a direct message.
- A deleted object's id is remembered for 90 days, so a Create that arrives after its Delete cannot bring the post
back; the post's ObjectRecord goes with it.
- A Join of one of our objects is answered with Ignore, as FEP-8a8e asks of a server without RSVP.
- A 503 with Retry-After is waited out like a 429 instead of counting as a failure of the host (GoToSocial throttling,
Mastodon's temporary key failures).
- Status.privapub carries what a Mastodon Status cannot: object type, title, excerpt, cover, the author's source,
link, video, audio and event details, and up/down votes, with every media URL proxied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
- ObjectRecord, one per stored remote object: the raw JSON (up to 256 KB, always hashed), delivered or fetched,
refetched from origin or not, the activity that brought it (or caused the fetch), shared or personal inbox, the
signature's key, algorithm and signed headers, received time, published and updated, the delivering activity's
@context, and up to ten later revisions from Update.
- Delivery details travel from InboxReceiver through the inbox job to the handlers as Arrival.Current.
- A host is described from its NodeInfo when we first hear from it, at most weekly (DescribeInstance job), never when
someone opens the details view.
- GET /api/privapub/v1/statuses/:id/provenance and /api/privapub/v1/instances/:host, with the extensions an object
used detected from its raw form (044f quotes, interaction policies, contexts, proofs, Misskey fields, MFM, FEP-8967
links, emoji, polls, language maps, url variants, Markdown content).
Checked live: a GoToSocial reply shows as delivered to the shared inbox, signed hs2019 with GoToSocial's fragment-less
key id, with its interaction policy detected, and gts.test is described as gotosocial 0.22.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
Communities:
- a post addressed to a community (to, cc or audience) is accepted
according to its posting policy - followers, anyone, or moderators -
and GroupDistributor announces the whole activity with `audience` to
the community's followers, plus the object for new posts so Mastodon
shows them; updates and deletes of community content are announced too;
- top-level posts are Pages with a name (the title, or a headline from
the text); /flock counts members, /wardens lists moderators;
- a Mastodon client posts into a community by mentioning it, or into a
remote group, which sets `audience`;
- an Announce of an activity from a remote group a persona follows (Lemmy)
is followed through: the object is fetched from its own origin, kept with
its AudienceURI, and fanned out to the group's local followers; updates
are applied in place and deletes checked against the origin.
Circles stop being local-only: an undiscoverable Group actor whose follows
are all requests the owner approves; posts addressed to the circle and its
/flock and delivered to members' own inboxes, never announced, never
public; a remote member's post into the circle is accepted from members
only. SignedFetchAuthorizer serves circle posts and collections only to a
signed request from a member or a member server's instance actor - 404 for
anyone else. Circles never surface in search, lookups, mentions, account
ids or profile pages.
Federation:SecureMode requires a valid signature on every GET under
/peasants except the instance actor. Group forms take a posting policy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
Fanout writes a TimelineEntry for every persona a post should reach: the
author, local followers of a local author, local followers of a remote one,
the members of a direct conversation or a circle. Mastodon's home rules
apply when it is written: a reply shows only to followers of both sides
(or to the one replied to), a reblog only where reblogs are wanted. A
mention of a local persona becomes a Mention notification.
Inbound posts are now also kept when a persona follows their author.
RemotePosts holds what CreateHandler and backfill share: building a Post
from a note, and fetching a public parent the first time a reply to it
arrives, so its author is known (a reply to an unknown or non-public
parent stays out of home timelines). Each fetched ancestor queues a
FetchAncestors job for the next one, up to ten deep.
/clientapi/timeline/home and /clientapi/notifications (with
/notifications/read) page by max_id for the persona's own root only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
An ObjectId carries its creation second and a per-process counter, so two
avatars made one after the other by the same login got ids a few counts
apart: a link between personas that every Mastodon client would have
seen. Avatar and Group now generate ids from the UTC day plus eight random
bytes (still valid ObjectIds), and a remote post's id is made from its
published time with a random tail, so posts page in the order they were
written rather than the order they arrived.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
DomainBlock (domain, severity, reject-media, public and private comment)
covers the domain and its subdomains. Admins manage them under
/clientapi/admin/domainblocks/{list,insert,delete}; the set is kept in
memory, reloaded on every change and at most five minutes stale.
A suspended domain is refused by FederationHttp.IsAllowed, so nothing is
fetched from it and no job delivers to it, and the inbox drops its
activities with a 202 before fetching any key. Reject-media strips the
attachments of posts from that domain. Silence is recorded for the
timelines and notifications that arrive in P1.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
Post gains what federation and the Mastodon API need: Visibility (Public,
Unlisted, FollowersOnly, Direct, Circle, LocalGeo), the author's account
id, to/cc, the Create's id, url, context, quote, InReplyToURI and the
parent's author, a separate SpoilerText next to the title, language,
mentions, hashtags, remote attachments (alt text, blurhash, focus, size),
reply/favourite/reblog counters, revisions, EditedAt and DeletedAt.
Direct messages are Posts with Visibility Direct and a ConversationId;
migration _005 copies DmPost rows across with their ids and fills the new
fields of existing posts. DmPost is left in place so a rollback still sees
the old messages.
Inbound:
- NoteParser reads Note, Article, Page, Question and media types: content,
then contentMap, then _misskey_content; summary as the spoiler and name
as the title; Mention and Hashtag tags; attachments; a PeerTube-style
list attribution prefers the person over the channel; quote URIs.
- Addressing classifies like Mastodon, finding followers-only by the
author's own followers URL (now stored on ForeignAvatar), not by a
"/followers" suffix.
- Create keeps a post when a local persona is addressed or mentioned, when
it replies to a local post (the parent's reply count goes up) or when a
community it follows is addressed; an unsolicited public post is not
stored. Update keeps the previous version as a revision.
The outbox and object endpoints serve only Public and Unlisted posts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
InboxService is split the way the roadmap lays out Federation/Inbox:
- InboxReceiver reads and verifies the request exactly as before, runs
the checks that need no fetch (the activity id's origin, a Follow of a
missing or local-only actor, an Undo of someone else's activity, an
embedded object attributed to someone else), queues a ProcessInbox job
and answers 202. The job's dedupe key is the activity id, so a peer that
delivers the same activity twice is processed once.
- InboxProcessor (two at a time, eight attempts) loads the verified actor
and hands the activity to the handler for its type.
- Handlers/{Follow,Undo,Create,Delete,Update}Handler are the old methods,
unchanged except that they no longer produce status codes; the JSON
helpers live in Objects/ActivityJson and the group membership helpers in
Inbox/ForeignMembers.
A slow fetch of an object or a remote actor now delays the job, not the
sender's HTTP request.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012CzABvBkbcFqoHdmi8b9WB
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5