mike - mike@macgirvin.com

Sean Tilley

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 07:38:56 +1100

Hey @mike, is there a place where I can read documentation / specs on the Zot protocol? Specifically, serving ActivityPub over Zot?

I'm extremely curious, and want to explore it some.

mike

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 15:15:49 +1100

Zot is a replacement for ActivityPub. It just uses the same ActivityStreams payloads with a more secure message transport. I seem to recall there's some documentation in the Hubzilla repository (under spec?), but I can't be bothered any more. Everything I believe in has been soundly rejected as being useful or important to anybody so they can just fork off. I'm working on Nomad these days and there is absolutely no documentation and it is likely that condition is permanent.

You won't like it, because nobody does, but streams is actually pretty cool if you want to explore Nomad. It's just a simple fediverse server and doesn't give a shirt about protocols or Mastodon or capitalism or branding. https://codeberg.org/streams/streams

Sean Tilley

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 15:35:47 +1100

@mike Damn, so it sounds like I'd have to really study Nomad in detail if I ever wanted to do anything with it. Ah, well.

I might still check out Streams, I'm mostly just doing my own little research project right now, and musing over whether various things could be put together in a way that works. I've long admired what is possible with Zot, but often struggled to understand how any of it works.

mike

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:18:22 +1100

We create the exact same data structures, and the only thing different is that we call a different driver to deliver them. The actor record is different, and the endpoints are different, but a Zot message and a Nomad message and an ActivityPub message are all identical.

Here's the bird's eye view: Instead of posting to each inbox, we post signed/encrypted data to a dedicated endpoint on a server and it delivers the message to the specified recipients. You only need to send one copy for all recipients on a website. If you look at the packet hitting this endpoint, it's encrypted gibberish. Only recipient websites can unpack it. But once unpacked, it's generic ActivityStreams.