SocialPub/FEDERATION.md

Federation

PrivaPub is an ActivityPub server written in C#. This document follows FEP-67ff and describes how it federates.

Supported federation protocols and standards

• ActivityPub (server-to-server)
• WebFinger
• HTTP Signatures, rsa-sha256 / hs2019 with RSA keys
• NodeInfo 2.0 and 2.1

Supported FEPs

• FEP-67ff: FEDERATION.md
• FEP-f1d5: NodeInfo in Fediverse Software
• FEP-2c59: Discovery of a WebFinger address from an ActivityPub actor

Planned: FEP-1b12 (communities), FEP-8fcf (followers synchronisation), FEP-5feb (indexable), FEP-7628 (Move), FEP-044f (quotes).

Actors

Every account is an avatar: one private login can own several, and they are deliberately unlinkable. Nothing in an actor document, a collection, NodeInfo or a delivery relates two avatars of the same login.

Thing	Address
Actor (Person, Group, Application)	/peasants/{name} (/users/{name} redirects)
Inbox	/peasants/{name}/mouth
Outbox	/peasants/{name}/anus
Shared inbox	/human-centipede
Followers / following	/peasants/{name}/groupies, /peasants/{name}/stalking
Objects	/peasants/{name}/scribbles/{id}
Activities	/peasants/{name}/grunts/{id}
Direct-message context	/peasants/{name}/whispers/{id}
Profile and post pages	/@{name}, /@{name}/{id}

The names are the project's own and are stable; resolve actors through WebFinger, not by guessing a path.

• The key is {actor}#main-key, RSA 2048, served as SPKI PEM with owner set to the actor.
• published on an actor is truncated to the day. indexable is false.
• The instance actor is /peasants/privapub (type Application). It signs every fetch PrivaPub makes, so no avatar's key is used to read another server's content.

Groups

A group is either a community or a circle.

• A community is a Group actor. It accepts Follow and re-shares (Announce) posts from its followers that address it. Full FEP-1b12 behaviour (announcing activities, audience, moderation) is planned.
• A circle is private and does not federate yet: its actor, collections and WebFinger answer 404, and its posts are never delivered.

Activities

Received:

Activity	Effect
Follow	follows an avatar or community; Accept is sent unless the community approves members by hand
Undo{Follow}	unfollows
Create{Note, Article, Page, Question, …}	stored when it addresses or mentions a local avatar, replies to a local post, or is addressed to a community the author follows
Update{Note}	replaces the content; the previous version is kept
Update{Person}	refetches the actor
Delete	deletes the object, or the actor and its follows

Sent: Create{Note}, Delete{Tombstone}, Accept{Follow}, Announce (communities).

A Create's Note carries Mastodon's content, contentMap, summary and sensitive, plus Mention and Hashtag tags. A post's title becomes name and is also the first, bold line of content, because Mastodon does not show name. A content warning without its own text uses the title, or "Content warning".

Visibility is expressed in to/cc the way Mastodon does it: public, unlisted, followers-only and direct. Inbound followers-only posts are recognised by the author's own followers collection.

Security rules a peer will notice

• Signatures. Inbox POSTs must be signed over (request-target), host, digest and date (or (created)). The date may be at most one hour old and fifteen minutes ahead. A bad signature gets 401, malformed input 400, an accepted activity 202, too many requests 429. Activities are processed after the 202.
• Origins. An actor document is accepted only from the address it names as its id. A key only if its actor lists it with owner set to the actor and on the actor's origin. An activity's id, and any object it creates, updates or deletes, must be on its actor's origin. An embedded object from another origin is fetched from that origin.
• Fetching. All fetches are signed by the instance actor. They go only to public addresses, follow at most three redirects and read at most 1 MB.
• HTML. Received HTML is sanitised to Mastodon's allowlist.
• Delivery. Failed deliveries are retried with Mastodon's backoff (16 attempts). A host that keeps failing is paused, starting at an hour and growing to a week.

Known limitations

• Likes, boosts, follow requests to remote accounts, media uploads and polls are not implemented yet.
• Collections expose counts, not members.
• Only rsa-sha256-style keys are verified. RFC 9421 signatures are planned.