FEP-521a and FEP-8b32. Every persona has an Ed25519 key of its own (Avatar.SigningKey; migration 014 gives the earlier
ones theirs), named in its actor's assertionMethod as a Multikey, the terms defined in the actor's own context. A
persona's activity going to a relay carries an eddsa-jcs-2022 proof (JSON canonicalised by RFC 8785, Jcs), so what
Activity-Relay forwards reaches Mastodon, which verifies it with its own code. Nothing else carries one: Mitra takes a
proof over the HTTP signature and refuses one by a key it has not read, without reading the actor again. Received: an
actor's own Multikeys are kept, and a forwarded activity whose proof one of them verifies is taken as it came instead of
being read again from its origin.
Discovery: WebFinger for the server's origin links its instance actor (FEP-d556), NodeInfo links it as the application
actor (FEP-2677), and actors name RFC 9421 under implements (FEP-844e).
Checked live: relay 16 (Activity-Relay's forward of alice's post reaches Mastodon), Mitra, GoToSocial and Mastodon
unchanged (165 in all).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
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
FEP-8fcf, received. When a delivery's Collection-Synchronization header digests the sender's followers on PrivaPub
otherwise than the personas following it, a job reads the list the header names (on the sender's origin, signed by the
instance actor): a follow the list leaves out ends, only when the list is the one the digest describes; a request it
lists is taken as accepted; a persona it lists that follows nothing there sends Undo{Follow}, as Mastodon does. Each
claiming delivery is compared once.
Checked live (scenarios/followsync.sh, now 15 checks): PrivaPub ends a follow Mastodon lost and undoes one only
Mastodon remembered.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Owner decision of 2026-10-06 (FEP-8fcf). A persona's delivery addressed to its followers carries a signed
Collection-Synchronization header naming its followers, its roll-call (…/groupies/roll-call) and the digest of its
accepted followers on the receiving server only. The roll-call answers a signed request with the persona's followers
on the signer's server and nobody else's.
Mastodon gives every Undo{Follow} it sends after reading a roll-call the same id (…#follows//undo), so a second one
looked like a copy: an Undo of a Follow that comes again while the follow it ends exists again is now kept once per
follow.
Checked live (scenarios/followsync.sh): Mastodon drops a follow PrivaPub lost, and undoes one it lost itself.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Owner decision of 2026-10-06: a persona's public or unlisted post outside any group names its replies
(…/scribbles/{id}/replies) and its conversation's context (FEP-7888), the root's …/context that a reply inherits from
its parent, ours or another server's. Both list only the public and unlisted posts PrivaPub holds; followers-only,
circle, direct and local-only posts name neither and their collections answer 404. Checked live: opening alice's
thread on Mastodon finds carol's reply, which nobody there follows (scenarios/threads.sh).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
The owner decided four gated questions, now in ROADMAP: personas publish a wall (G-0009), their public posts go to the
relays PrivaPub subscribes to, public threads publish their replies and context, and FEP-8fcf follower digests are sent.
The first is in: a persona's own public post outside any group, its edit and its deletion also go to the relays that
accepted us, as Mastodon sends them; nothing less public, and no boost. Checked live (scenarios/relay.sh, 15 checks):
the post reaches Activity-Relay, and Mastodon through aode-relay's announce. Mastodon drops what Activity-Relay forwards
without an LD signature or FEP-8b32 proof, which PrivaPub does not add yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Once a follow holds, OutboxBackfill reads the account's latest public posts from its outbox's first page (twenty at
most, once a day) and keeps them as any fetched post: its profile shows them at once instead of only what it posts from
then on. Homes still get only what arrives afterwards, as on Mastodon. Announces and other servers' objects in the
outbox are left out. Checked live against Mastodon (scenarios/pins.sh, now 9 checks).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
An activity now goes once to each server, to its shared inbox when it has one, for the accounts a post names, answers
or quotes as for its followers, as Mastodon delivers (a circle post excepted: each member's copy names that member).
BookWyrm took the same post twice when one copy reached its shared inbox and another the named account's inbox at once.
SharedInboxTests checks a reply to a follower's post goes once.
BookWyrm joins the pasture (peers/bookwyrm.sh: its image on the shared Postgres and Redis, gunicorn and a Celery worker,
its user, book and statuses made in its Django shell). scenarios/bookwyrm.sh: follows both ways, a review, a comment and
a quotation reaching alice as BookWyrm's pure posts, her like, boost and reply landing there, her post naming bwuser and
bwuser's like and reply, a deletion, the unfollow and statistics: 20 checks. GoToSocial (64), Mastodon (57) and Misskey
(35) still pass.
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
An account elsewhere that pins or unpins one of its posts (Add or Remove on its `featured`) now shows those pins on its
profile here (`pinned=true`), in its order and its public posts only; a community's announce of a moderator's Add does
the same for the community. The `featured` collection itself is read with the account's counts, at most once a day, so
pins made before PrivaPub ever saw an account show too. Any other target (Smithereen's wall, a community's moderators)
is dropped. A persona's pin and unpin go to the post's audience as Add and Remove on /trophies, as Mastodon sends them.
Checked live against Mastodon (scenarios/pins.sh, 8 checks). The town's checker learnt three peer rules from the
village: Misskey and Sharkey keep a forwarded reply only with its author's LD signature (only Mastodon signs), they
count no renote by a bot, and Mastodon never sees a Lemmy vote on a post in a community. The village of 2026-10-05
checks clean, 2454 of 2454.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Smithereen joins the pasture (tools/pasture/peers/smithereen.sh): its image on the shared MySQL, with imgproxy and a
file server behind Caddy, a JDK trust store with the pasture's CA, accounts from its signup form, and a password grant
for a local application. scenarios/smithereen.sh drives its VKontakte-like API: friends as mutual follows, wall posts,
comments, likes, reposts (quotes there), polls, edits, deletions, private messages, the unfollow and statistics, 30
checks. A post on someone else's wall never reaches PrivaPub, since Smithereen sends it only to servers whose actors
publish a wall: G-0009, waiting for the owner.
PrivaPub: a server description that failed (Smithereen serves no NodeInfo until it has a description) frees its week,
so the server's next arrival asks again instead of a week later.
The shared Postgres takes 400 connections: at 100 the village seed ran it dry (Sharkey's API answered 500, Misskey
dropped deliveries). The seeder records a follow that stands from an earlier seed when the step itself fails, so the
checker no longer expects that follower to see nothing.
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
tools/pasture/flood/flood.cs answers as twenty fake servers (flood1..20.test)
and sends signed Creates, Likes and Follows at a set rate; load.sh measures
the answers, the queue's wait and processing times, its drain and a persona's
home timeline meanwhile (docs/LOAD.md has the method and the runs).
What the runs found:
- Every unique index was partial on $type: "string", which MongoDB never uses
for an equality lookup, so every post by ObjectURI, actor by ActorURI,
deleted object, domain block, remote instance and the rest was a
collection scan (280 ms a post lookup at 30 000 posts). They are partial on
$gt: "" now, which an equality on a string implies; MongoDB.Entities
rebuilds them in place at the next start.
- Two inbox workers capped intake near 110 activities a second:
Federation:InboxConcurrency and DeliveryConcurrency (default 8) set them.
- The indexes the plan listed as missing: a post's boosts and replies, a
persona's boosts, who follows an actor, timeline rows by author, a post's
likes and pins.
At 300 activities a second (200 let through, the rest 429 by the per-origin
limit) the queue wait went from 29 s to 6 ms at p50; with the limits lifted
PrivaPub processes about 900 a second, each in under 10 ms, and the home
timeline stays under 20 ms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
PrivaPub dropped Move as an unknown type and showed no `moved` on accounts.
Now a Move is believed as Mastodon believes it: the moving account sends it
about itself, and the new account, read again from its own server, names it
in alsoKnownAs (now kept on remote accounts). The old account then shows the
new one as `moved` in the Mastodon API. The personas following it keep
following it: following the new account on their behalf would tell another
server about them, so that waits for the owner.
Checked live against GoToSocial (scenarios/moves.sh: an alias, a move, 6
checks).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Lemmy 0.19 (most of the threadiverse) and Mbin take a private message only
as a ChatMessage and refuse a direct Note. A direct message to one account
elsewhere that writes to us as ChatMessages now goes out as one: to it
alone, without a mention in its text, kept on the post (Post.AsChatMessage)
so the served copy and an edit match. No software name decides it.
Live against Lemmy 0.19: alice's answer to lemmyuser's private message and
another persona's message to lemmyuser arrive (29 checks). A first message
to an account that never wrote to anyone here is still a Note, which they
refuse; G-0008 keeps that open for the owner.
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
PieFed 1.7.17 (dockurr's image of the release) runs in the pasture with its
Celery worker on the shared Postgres and Redis, and scenarios/piefed.sh
checks it both ways: 29 checks, communities, titled threads, comments, votes
up and down, a community poll and a vote in it, private messages, a
moderator's lock, unlock and removal, the unfollow and statistics.
What it showed:
- PieFed sends a community's announces to the inbox of the Application at a
peer's root (as Lemmy serves its site actor) and to /inbox otherwise.
PrivaPub answered 404 at its root, so every announce went to an /inbox it
does not have. The instance actor now answers at / for ActivityPub
requests, unsigned under SecureMode as at its own address.
- PieFed keeps serving a thread its moderator removed, so the removal could
never be checked against the post's origin. A community on the post's own
server now speaks for it; one elsewhere still waits for the origin to say
the post is gone.
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
Three shapes Funkwhale 2.0 sends, each of which lost something:
- its Accept is named after the Follow it answers, on our origin (`…#follows/<uuid>/accept`), and was refused as off its
actor's origin, so no follow of a channel completed: an Accept or Reject whose id extends the id of the activity it
answers, on our origin, is now taken;
- a channel deletes its uploads in one Delete without an id, their ids in a list as the object's id: each is deleted;
- its NodeInfo discovery names the document under its swagger schema's URL: a link whose path names NodeInfo is taken
when no rel is known.
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
Mobilizon sends its NodeInfo as `application/json; profile=http://…#` with the URL unquoted, which .NET cannot parse,
so the document was refused for its content type and the server never described; and it names its software
"Mobilizon" where NodeInfo wants lower case. The media type is now read from the raw header when the parsed one is
missing, and software names are lowercased, so one software is counted under one name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Lemmy keeps the ids of the activities it received and never answers one again, so resending the same Follow could not
heal a follow whose Accept it lost: the village's community follow stayed pending through two resends. Each resend is
now the same follow under its own id (<follow id>-again-<n>), and an Accept naming any of them answers the follow;
the Undo still embeds the follow, so servers match it by its actor and object. Sent this way, the stuck follow was
accepted at once.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Friendica's activity ids are uniqid(): a short prefix and the microsecond. Two of its processes answering two follows at
once gave both Accepts one id, and PrivaPub, queueing each inbox activity once per id, dropped the second as a copy:
that follow stayed pending on our side while Friendica counted the persona as a follower (seen in the town's Friendica
pair). An id that comes back carrying another type, actor or object is now queued apart; a true copy is still dropped.
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
Lemmy sends a vote to the community alone, which relays it to the post's
server. A persona's reply in a thread of a community nobody here follows
lost its Lemmy upvotes: the relay was dropped as "not followed". Such a
relay is now taken when the vote (or its undo) is on one of our posts in a
thread rooted in that community; from any other unfollowed group it is
still dropped. For that, a post keeps the community its `audience` names
(FEP-1b12) however it arrived, fetched for a thread as well as announced.
Found by the town's village (p191: 1 like counted of 2).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
WordPress's ActivityPub plugin (and Ghost and Fedify) sign with RFC 9421
first and fall back to draft-cavage only after a refusal, so each first
delivery cost two requests and a 401 in our statistics. Now a request
carrying Signature-Input is verified as an HTTP message signature: its
covered components (the method and our own public target, the body's
Content-Digest), its created and expires, with the actor's RSA key under
PKCS#1 v1.5 or PSS. Deliveries and signed fetches both take it; the
ledger names the scheme (rfc9421:rsa-v1_5-sha256). What PrivaPub sends
stays draft-cavage, which every server reads. Ed25519 waits for FEP-521a
keys.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Pixelfed names one of our posts by the address of its page
(/@name/<post id>, the post's url) in its Like, Announce and their Undo,
so its likes were dropped as unknown objects. Before an activity is
handled, such a reference to a post of ours, as its object or the object
of the activity it undoes, is replaced by the post's id. Found by the
pasture's new Pixelfed peer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Lemmy's moderation reached PrivaPub only as removals. Now a remote
community's lock and ban, relayed in its Announce, apply too:
- a lock (Announce{Lock}, or commentsEnabled false on the post) refuses
replies to the thread, ours included, until Undo{Lock}; statuses say so
in privapub.locked;
- a ban of a persona (Announce{Block} with the community as target, or the
moderator's own Block sent straight to us, which is the community's ban
and never the moderator's block of the persona) shows as blocked_by on
the community and refuses the persona's posts and replies there until
the Undo.
The Lemmy scenario's removal was an expected failure only because it gave
up before Lemmy's 30-second batch; it now waits, and checks the lock and
the ban live (Lemmy refuses a lock or an unban without a reason): 29
checks, none expected to fail. G-0003 and G-0006 are closed.
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
The context of a remote post showed only what PrivaPub happened to hold:
replies from servers nobody here follows were never seen, and only the
ancestors were ever fetched. Now a persona opening a public remote thread
queues FetchReplies for the post and its root, at most once an hour each.
The job reads the thread's own collection first (FEP-7888 `context`, which
Mastodon 4.5+ serves with every reply at any depth; posts or, as FEP-f228
allows, the activities that made them), and otherwise the post's `replies`
(PeerTube's `comments`) and the replies' own, two levels down. At most 5
pages and 100 posts a job, signed by the instance actor, never a persona;
each post is fetched from its own origin and stored through StoreContext,
so only public and unlisted ones are kept.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Lemmy turns an upvote into a downvote with a Dislike alone (and back with a
Like), so the like stayed counted next to the downvote. Now an account has
one vote on a post: a Dislike takes its like away, a Like its downvote.
The Lemmy scenario's relayed votes were never failing for that reason only:
Lemmy 1.0 sends what it queued every 30 seconds, and the check gave up after
30. It waits a minute now, and both votes are plain checks: 22 pass, the
moderator's removal stays an expected failure (P7).
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
Mastodon's streaming API: /api/v1/streaming as a WebSocket (streams
subscribed in the URL or by message) and /api/v1/streaming/{stream} as
server-sent events, with health and the URL advertised. The user stream
tells posts reaching the persona's home (not those an exclusive list keeps
apart, which its list stream tells), notifications, edits and deletions;
public, hashtag and list streams tell what belongs in them. An in-process
hub carries ids only; each connection maps a post or a notification for its
own persona as it sends it, so nothing it may not see, or whose author it
blocked or muted, goes out. A deletion reaches only the streams that showed
the post. The token comes as access_token, header or WebSocket protocol.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A server can take a Follow with 202 and drop it afterwards, as Pleroma does
while it cannot fetch our actor; the request then stayed pending for good.
Following again now sends an unanswered request once more, the same
activity, at most once an hour (a delivery's `again` key).
accounts/search takes following=true: only accounts the persona follows,
by the start of their name, display name or server, never resolved; a
client fills a list with it. "already take" becomes "already taken".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin relay their members' votes, and the undoing of
them, inside the community's Announce; PrivaPub dropped them all as
unsupported (G-0003, the Lemmy scenario's expected failures). A relayed
Like, Dislike or Undo from a community a persona follows is now handled
as if its actor had sent it. The community vouches for what accounts on
its own server do and for what is done to its own posts, as Lemmy trusts
it (refetching every vote would not scale); a vote from elsewhere on
anything else is believed only once fetched from its own origin.
Moderation relayed the same way is still open.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A reply whose text had lost the @name of the author it answers (decePub
prefills it, a reader may delete it) was addressed to nobody on the
author's server. PrivaPub delivered it to the author's inbox anyway, but
GoToSocial keeps only what is addressed to someone there, so the reply
never appeared under the post. A public or unlisted reply to a remote
post now names its parent's author in cc, as Pleroma does; the reply
already says whom it answers, so nothing new is revealed. The parent
author's actor id is kept on the reply (InReplyToActorURI).
Found by decePub's end-to-end tests on the town.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Inbound Block was dropped as an unknown type (the pasture's last
Mastodon expected failure, G-0002). Now, as Mastodon does it: the
follows between the blocker and the persona end here too (nothing is
sent back; the blocker already ended its side), the blocker's posts and
notifications are hidden from the persona and kept out of its home, the
persona's posts are no longer addressed to the blocker by mention or
reply, and the relationship says blocked_by. Undo{Block} lifts it. The
block is kept in BlockedBy, unique per persona and blocker.
The Mastodon scenario checks blocked_by instead of expecting a failure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A remote post decided who here may see it by its Mention tags alone. A
followers-only post addressed in to or cc to a persona without naming
it (Akkoma's to[], or a GoToSocial edit that took the @name out while
the post stayed addressed to the persona) was hidden from that persona.
Such personas are now kept as silent mentions, as Mastodon does: they
see the post and it reaches their home, and no list shows them as
mentioned. An edit never narrows who a post was for.
The GoToSocial note that showed it is the first captured fixture
(Fixtures/gotosocial), and parses with its lone tag, to and cc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Mastodon answers 422 when two first contacts from one actor race to
create its account (ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid on the unique uri), and
409 while another worker holds its lock. A persona that followed two
Mastodon accounts at once had one Follow refused that way; the job died
on its first attempt and the persona waited on "requested" forever.
Both answers are now retried twice on the usual backoff before they
count as refusals.
Found by the town (a village of 23 accounts on seven servers).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
LikeHandler.MaySee let a remote account interact with a followers-only
post only when the post named it in to, cc or its mentions. Our own
followers-only posts are addressed to the followers collection, never to
each follower, and circle posts were not considered at all, so every
like, reaction, downvote and poll vote from a follower on a
followers-only post, and from a member on a circle post, was dropped as
"not-visible". Likes, dislikes, reactions and poll votes now ask
VisibilityPolicy.RemoteCanSee: anyone for public and unlisted posts, an
addressed account for a DM, an accepted follower or an addressed account
for followers-only, a foreign member for a circle post, and never a
server's instance actor (SignedFetchAuthorizer's alias is for refetches
only).
Found by planning the town's multi-server interaction checks (G-0001).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
PrivaPub now finds CDNs three ways, best first: the address ranges the
CDNs publish (Cloudflare, Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, Bunny, Gcore,
Imperva), downloaded daily by CdnUpdater and kept in CdnRangeSet; the
CDN's fingerprint in the responses it already gets from a server
(EdgeHintsHandler on the federation client); and the networks that carry
only a CDN. The fixed ASN list is gone; ASNs shared with plain hosting
(AWS, DataPacket) no longer hide a server. A server's Geo records the
CDN, its domain and how it was found, and weekly snapshots now keep the
city and coordinates too.
Servers through time (ServerPlaces): /instances/:host/history lists a
server's weekly snapshots, a CDN-fronted server's geo names the CDN's
domain and where the server was before it (before_cdn), and
/api/privapub/v1/cdns and /cdns/:domain group servers by CDN with week
by week who joined and who left. Owner decisions recorded in ROADMAP.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
A Note's `location` that is a Place with coordinates (Pixelfed sends
them as strings) is kept in the new Post.Place and shown as
Status.privapub.place {name, latitude, longitude, country}; an edit
replaces it. An Event's location stays its own `places`, and nothing
renders a place back out. Closes the INTEROP P2 Pixelfed location gap
and the ROADMAP long-tail item.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
- A community's announces resolve, as FEDERATION.md and ROADMAP always said Announce ids do. GroupDistributor keeps
each one it sends (GroupAnnouncement, unique by id). /grunts serves it while the post it carries is shown and 410
after, and also serves the announce-{postId} ids the group outbox lists, which now keep a stable `published`
instead of the time of the fetch.
- A persona's boost points at the boosted post: its `url` in the Mastodon API is the boosted post's page, and a browser
following the boost's id is redirected there instead of getting JSON.
- /tags/{tag}, where every Hashtag link we send points, is now a public page of this server's public posts with that
tag, with the same strict CSP and noindex as the profile pages.
- Grouped notifications (/api/v2/notifications, its unread count, a group, its accounts and dismiss). We advertise
api_versions.mastodon = 7 so clients show quotes, and clients that trust it call these; they answered 404. Likes and
boosts of one post group together, as do follows within an hour. The version string stays 4.2.0 until streaming
and Web Push exist.
- A remote account's follower, following and post counts are what its server publishes. AccountCountsJob reads its
collections' totalItems from its own origin, signed by the instance actor, at most daily and only after the account
was fetched, never when someone looks. They used to be 0.
- The other ids that do not resolve are documented as such: Update, Delete, EmojiReact, QuoteRequest and its answers,
Flag, Ignore and poll votes.
676 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
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
Owner decision 2026-10-04: fix the account privacy findings.
- Sign-in. Every failure answers "That username and password do not match." after the same work: an unknown login
is hashed against a decoy, and the comparison is constant-time. "Banned" is told only to someone who gave the right
password. This covers /clientapi/user/login, /invitation/login and /oauth/login.
- Recovery.
- Every request answers the same sentence and queues a SendRecovery job, whether or not the account exists or has an
email. The lookup, the code and SMTP move to RecoveryJob, so neither the answer nor its timing says anything.
- Codes are kept only as a SHA-256 hash, for one hour. Migration _011 drops the plaintext ones, which never expired.
- A recovered password ends every session of the root. RootSessions sets CredentialsChangedAt, which JwtEvents
checks against the JWT's issue time, now stamped as nbf, and revokes each persona's OAuth tokens and authorizations.
- Deleting a root (RootRemoval: the admin route, or the restored self-delete at /clientapi/user/delete, which asks for
the password).
- Its sessions end.
- Each persona and each group it owns sends Delete{Actor} to its followers, its members and the accounts it follows.
- The personas' posts are emptied.
- /peasants/{name} answers 410 with a Tombstone (formerType Person or Group), as do its inbox and WebFinger, through
LocalActorService.Gone. The names stay reserved.
- The root keeps only a unique `deleted-{id}` name; the second deletion on an instance used to collide on
"Deleted user".
Also, from phase 2's pasture: GoToSocial files a circle post like a DM and shows it only to accounts it mentions. Each
member's copy, and a member's refetch, now also mentions that member silently. The GoToSocial scenario checks circle
posts in conversations, like DMs, and they pass there now, as on Mastodon.
657 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Circles (owner decision 2026-10-04: fix them for compatibility):
- Mastodon 4.7 and GoToSocial drop a post that names none of their accounts, and a circle post named only the circle
and its /flock. OutboxPublisher.Publish now sends each member a copy that also names that member in `cc`, on the
activity and on the object, and names no other member. The Create, every Update (edit, poll, quote approval, policy,
through the new PublishUpdate) and the Delete (StatusService.Remove now uses Publish) all go that way.
- UpdateOf renders with the post's group, so an Update keeps a circle post's `audience` and a community post's `Page`
and title.
- A reply to a circle post stays in the circle, whichever client wrote it.
- A circle post can no longer quote a post that needs permission: asking would show the circle post to its author.
Posts that are not public, on refetch (SignedFetchAuthorizer.MayRead):
- Followers-only, direct and circle posts are served to a signed request from someone they were for, or from the
instance actor of a server where one of them lives. That is a follower or an addressed account, an addressed
account, or a member. Everyone else still gets 404.
- Once deleted they answer those readers 410. Mastodon deletes its copy when a refetch answers 404.
- A circle refetch names the requesting member, or the members on the requesting server, as the delivered copy did.
- /grunts/create-{id} serves the same.
- /peasants/{name}/whispers/{id}, a DM's `context`, was never routed. It is now the conversation's posts, for its
participants only.
SecureMode lets browsers through to the redirect to the public page, instead of answering them 401.
653 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Owner decisions (2026-10-04, recorded in docs/ROADMAP.md): production runs everything that is built, and nothing waits
on a person running a command.
- Geolocation updates itself. GeoUpdater, a hosted service, checks daily whether each DB-IP Lite database was built this
month. If not, it fetches this month's, or last month's early in the month. It installs a file only once it opens as
the right kind of database, then swaps it in atomically, and the locator reloads at once. Lookups now run under the
lock, so a reload can no longer dispose a reader mid-lookup. The systemd timer, its script and their setup.sh lines
are gone: the root step they needed never happened, and none is needed now. /stargazing names the database in use.
- The admin CLI runs after the app is built, with every service and nothing started.
- `create-root <login> [--admin]` takes the password on stdin; it is how the first login is made while sign-up is
closed.
- `smoke <persona>` keeps the root `deploy-smoke` and an undiscoverable persona, and gives the root a new password
on every run.
- The deploy signs in as @thepra. It runs the CLI, gets a token through the real OAuth flow (tools/smoke/oauth.sh,
moved out of the pasture's privapub_token, which now uses it), checks the signed-in API and that @thepra is
undiscoverable, then revokes the token. PRIVAPUB_SMOKE_TOKEN is gone.
- The deploy also fails when:
- NodeInfo and the instance API disagree about registrations;
- /stargazing does not say the crawler is on;
- the geolocation databases are missing or more than 40 days old.
- The crawler is on in production, seeded with ten large servers of different kinds. FEDERATION.md now describes it
and how to opt out.
- One registrations switch (Registrations:Mode, default Invitations; Open in tests and the pasture). It is read by
open sign-up (403 when closed), NodeInfo `openRegistrations`, and v1 and v2 of the instance API, so they can no longer
disagree. Before, NodeInfo said open and the instance API said closed. Group invitations always work, so
invites_enabled is true.
- A persona edit through /clientapi no longer resets what the Mastodon API set (discoverable, locked, quote policy…):
the theme is merged into the settings instead of replacing them.
650 tests pass. The deploy's smoke step was rehearsed against the pasture's PrivaPub.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
Sharkey 2025.4.7 is the Misskey peer under another name, image, database, Redis db and
home. Its scenario is Misskey's plus edits both ways and the FEP-e232 quote tag: 40 checks
pass.
Akkoma 3.20.1 publishes no image, so tools/pasture/images/akkoma installs its OTP
release, pinned by checksum, and appends Caddy's CA to the CA bundles the release ships.
Its scenario has 44 checks, which pass three runs in a row:
- follows, posts, CW, followers-only posts and the published time;
- replies, likes, boosts and their undos;
- EmojiReact both ways and withdrawn;
- DMs, polls, quotes, media, edits with history and deletes, both ways;
- unfollow, block, unblock and statistics.
The two bugs, both fixed:
- Followers-only posts arrived as DMs on Pleroma and Akkoma. They call a post private
only if an address in `to` contains "/followers" or its cc is not empty. Ours is
/groupies, and a post mentioning nobody had an empty cc. The followers collection is now
named in cc as well, which tells nobody anything new.
- Akkoma's open polls showed as ended and refused votes. Akkoma carries an open poll's
end in `closed` and sends no `endTime`. A `closed` in the future is now read as the end.
Neither of these is a PrivaPub bug:
- Akkoma's Linkify never takes @user@host.test for a mention, so its DM addresses alice
with to[].
- Its API never reports a remote blocker as blocked_by, so the block is read from its
database.
Also in this commit:
- The rate limits are configuration (RateLimits: AccountsPerMinute, InboxBurst,
InboxPerTenSeconds), with the old values as defaults. The pasture raises the accounts
limit, which back-to-back runs from one address had hit.
- A new Lemmy never sends what it queued for a server before it started that server's
send worker, so the scenario waits for the worker before its first follow.
All six peers in one clean pass: GoToSocial 54 (+1 expected), Mastodon 49 (+2), Misskey
35, Sharkey 40, Akkoma 44, and Lemmy 20 (+3) once the worker wait was added. 642 tests
pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
peers/lemmy.sh runs the Lemmy 1.0.0-beta.2 backend on the shared Postgres. It trusts
Caddy's CA through SSL_CERT_FILE and reaches the pasture through
DANGER_FEDERATION_ALLOW_LOCAL_IP. Lemmy 0.19 cannot join: its rustls trusts only its
bundled roots. LEMMY_LOG sets RUST_LOG.
scenarios/lemmy.sh drives Lemmy through its v4 API. 20 checks pass, three runs in a row:
- communities both ways;
- a titled thread each way, and alice's mention of a Lemmy community becoming a thread
there;
- the Lemmy community's announce reaching alice's home;
- comments both ways and alice's like as an upvote;
- private messages both ways;
- statistics.
Two expected failures: votes, which Lemmy sends only through the community as
Announce{Like|Dislike}, and a moderator's removal. Both belong to P7.
What it showed, in docs/INTEROP.md:
- Lemmy 1.0 keeps its user's thread in a remote community pending until the community
announces it back. It clears the flag before answering that echo 400 ("Object is not
remote"). Leaving the author's server out of the Announce, as tried here, left every
such thread pending, so GroupDistributor now says why the echo stays.
- Every bare Announce{object} is answered 400, as Lemmy answers its own compatibility
Announce(Page).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5