Streams and Lemmy?

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 20:12:39 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Bill Statler wrote the following post Mon, 04 Nov 2024 20:12:38 -0400

Streams and Lemmy?
Has anyone succeeded in posting to a Lemmy community using (streams)? I apparently joined successfully today, but the delivery report on my first post shows "delivery rejected 400".

I know Mike was working on Lemmy compatibility in early 2023, but there were still problems.

@Bill Statler

Giac El Vecio

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 20:39:17 -0400 from Unio Diversi Spiritus

I had success, I mean I can see some of my comments there , but always got strange messages in the delivery reports 🤷🏼‍♂️

Bill Statler

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 20:52:46 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

I don't see my test post on their page, so I guess it failed.

I'll wait a few days, see whether I receive posts from other members, and try commenting on them.

Giac El Vecio

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 21:02:44 -0400 from Unio Diversi Spiritus

I had success a lot of months ago and just sometime...

Giac El Vecio

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 21:03:50 -0400 from Unio Diversi Spiritus

And if I remember correctly just as comment

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:42:33 -0400 last edited: Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:45:55 -0400 from Y

An important consideration is that top-level posts need a title or they will get tossed [edit: or was that bbforum?] And I sort of vaguely recall something like the lemmy content needing to be a Link object (not a post at all), and that's where they lost me. It seemed like a fair bit of additional infrastructure to build instead of allowing something that more projects can produce natively; like a Note or Article with a Link attachment; which you can do right now on most platforms. Then we have to figure out if any of the recipients are lemmy folks; and what do we do if some of them are, but others are not? Send different posts to each? So I've been kind of waiting for them to make a move towards improving compatibility. Otherwise it will need to be something like an editor plugin and you'll click a button to turn the post editor into a Lemmy "submit link" editor.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:57:46 -0400 from Y

Had a quick glance and you should be able to post by attaching a link and supplying a title; and send it with public scope to the 'community' actor. Not the person who owns/controls the community actor, whom it is also possible to follow. Don't know if this will work, but that appears to be what they want to see.

Bill Statler

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:08:55 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Weird. I'll try a few experiments. Thanks.

Giac El Vecio

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:15:43 -0400 from Unio Diversi Spiritus

What I do using Mitra for to post in Lemmy site:
A text as a title - "Jimi Hendrix - blablabla"

@communityname.....

Link "YouTubevideo....."

Bill Statler

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 01:07:23 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Tried something like Giac's suggestion. Result: it's queued, and the destination Lemmy instance is down with a server error. ROFL, I hope that is a coincidence and I didn't just crash a whole Lemmy instance!

Bill Statler

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:17:10 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

4 attempts that did not work (all gave "delivery rejected 400" errors):

Direct message to the Lemmy community, with title, text, and an image with alt text, just like I would do it if posting to a streams group.
Direct message, with title, no text, and a link directly to the actual image, surrounded in [zrl]...[/zrl] tags.
Same as 2, but just the raw link, no [zrl]...[/zrl].
Same as 3, but made it a public post with the Lemmy community tagged.

(This is not important to me -- I was just testing it out of curiosity. Don't anybody waste time on it unless you think it's fun to pursue.)

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 03:44:14 -0400 from Y

Use the link tool. It should attach the link to your post as well as display it. I know streams provides link attachments in some circumstances. I just don't recall at the moment why it doesn't happen to all of them.

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:34:21 -0400 from Unio Diversi Spiritus

In mitra title doesn't exist, I do in this way,
I don't write in the first line, I start in the second with a text, then I go in a new line and write the @communityname, than a new line and I write the link ,
all this in mitra, I don't know if this works here

Hamiller Hubzilla

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:13:27 -0400 from hubzilla

@Giac El Vecio

If you use the first line as the title line and then insert a paragraph, the first line should be used as the title for Lemmy.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 14:20:35 -0400 from Y

Had a quick look and the link tool isn't providing the attachment by default. I know it happens on occasion, so if having a Link object as an attachment is required for Lemmy to associate it as a link, you might be able to fake the attachment by adding

[ attachment ]https://example.com[ /attachment ]

Replace the url with the actual URL you wish to submit to Lemmy.

Bill Statler

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 14:53:09 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Collecting a bunch of comments written by Waitman Gobble in a different thread:

Waitman Gobble wrote the following post Wed, 06 Nov 2024 22:35:58 -0400

not sure if people even can install lemmy from the latest release.

"Error { message: None, inner: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "idx_person_lower_actor_id", context: context: SpanTrace [] }"

apparently nobody tests releases before they are released. lol

Waitman Gobble wrote the following post Thu, 07 Nov 2024 01:21:14 -0400

actually i was reading the install directions, which say 0.18.5 but i noticed that 0.19.5 is current release.. let's try that again :)

Waitman Gobble wrote the following post Thu, 07 Nov 2024 02:13:15 -0400

Same error. Tracking down that issue more info mañana

Waitman Gobble wrote the following post Thu, 07 Nov 2024 12:04:54 -0400

ok so i figured out the issue is the 'site name' can only be 20 characters (i need to learn how to count :) but what happens is apparently since systemd unit is Restart=on-failure it tries to restart max 5 times, and tries to create the local_user and person entries for admin 4 additional times which throws the key violation error (4 times). looking through the errors in journalctl -u lemmy it wasn't obvious to me that i needed to go all the way up through the restarts to find the first error. :)

Waitman Gobble wrote the following post Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:22:06 -0400

i have lemmy set up - how are you trying to comment/post? when i go to subscribe and put in streams or hubzilla instance i get the same error "404 not found"

https://rumbly.net/activitypub/externalInteraction

Waitman Gobble wrote the following post Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:54:54 -0400

i can subscribe using streams, but hubzilla reports protocol error or something. have not tried commenting yet

Bill Statler

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 15:02:16 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Random related information:

Lemmy v0.19.6 was released today.

Papa Dragon and lofti report that they get a "Remote channel or protocol unavailable" error when trying to add an ActivityPub connection from streams.

Bill Statler

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 15:14:33 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Waitman Gobble wrote:

how are you trying to comment/post?

I don't have a Lemmy account. I was able to join from the streams "Connections" page, where the Lemmy community appears as a group.

I have tried 6 variations for posting so far, and all give "delivery rejected 400" errors. There are a lot more variations I will try. (The past few days have been a bit busy here.) I may wait until the Lemmy instance has been upgraded to 0.19.6.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 16:51:11 -0400 last edited: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 16:52:34 -0400 from Y

Reviewing their documentation once again. Title is required, although they have workarounds. For streams, just set a title. They say a URL (image or link) is optional. If it is provided, it needs to be listed in the attachments. Uploaded images will do this automatically. Linked images probably won't. For URLs you'll need the attachment bbcode hack I showed the other day. In either case, ensure there is only one attachment.

From the lemmy docs:

attributedTo     ID of the user which created this post
to                    ID of the community where it was posted to
name               Title of the post (mandatory)
content            Body of the post
attachment      A single website or image link
image              Thumbnail for url, only present if it is an image link
commentsEnabled    False indicates that the post is locked, and no comments can be added
sensitive         True marks the post as NSFW, blurs the thumbnail and hides it from users with NSFW setting disabled
stickied           True means that it is shown on top of the community
published        Datetime when the post was created
updated          Datetime when the post was edited (not present if it was never edited)

What sticks out are two fields. Without 'commentsEnabled' set to true (a proprietary hack streams doesn't support), comments won't be allowed (presumably?). This is unfortunate as there is no way in streams to set this proprietary flag.

The other us 'updated'. Streams always provides both 'published' and 'updated'. If there have been no updates, these are the same. This is a convention that goes back to the dawn of Unix and I have no desire to change it. If lemmy requires that the updated field be missing on a new post, you will be unable to federate with them. I don't know if this is a requirement, but it's something that can be tested by a developer by commenting out the the updated timestamp generation prior to testing. src/Lib/Activity.php::L956 and also L::1198 - (based on current dev branch).

If updated or commentsEnabled turn out to be the problem areas, please suggest that lemmy be more forgiving about ActivityPub compliant activities which don't meet their arbitrary policies.

It could be something else entirely. But these are the two things that stick out as potential problem areas from reviewing their doco.

Bill Statler

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 18:05:19 -0400 from Bunny of Doom

Thanks, Mike. It's amazing how much incompatibility can fit within one Fediverse.

I'll try a few more post variations based on your suggestions. Maybe I'll stumble across a magic incantation that works despite Lemmy's policies.