Event Federation / is on Nostr

We are working on a proper federation of events managed on a WordPress site. With support from @NGIZero

Last Notes

2025-02-11 16:41:49

Event Bridge for ActivityPub 1.0.0
When is the right time to release version 1.0.0? – If I had waited until every interoperability issue was resolved, probably never.
However, the main goal of this plugin is now realized: enhancing the WordPress ActivityPub plugin to support third-party integrations – specifically, ensuring that events from popular WordPress event plugins can be shared and discovered across the Fediverse (Release on Codeberg.org). Checkout this Gancio demo site, where you can see events sourced from a WordPress site in action!
A special thanks to the team at Radically Open Security (@nprofile…mljs) for their security review. My correspondence with the pentester Marcus Bointon (@nprofile…e5n8) was not only professional but also fun and incredibly insightful – I learned far more than I could have imagined.
I’m also grateful to Matthias Pfefferle (@nprofile…h5lw) and the other developers of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Collaborating with them to make the plugin more adaptable for third-party use has been a rewarding experience.
A huge shoutout to @nprofile…k90r for his contributions to FEP-8a8e, his insightful ideas, valuable discussions, and his incredibly quick implementations of all kinds of suggestions and bug reports in Gancio.
Most importantly, a huge thank you to NLnet (@nprofile…klwf) and NGI Zero (@nprofile…zzgr). Without their support, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to develop this piece of software.What’s New in 1.0.0
Support more Event Plugins: Added support for the EventPrime and EventON event plugins.
Event Self-Announce: Automatically announces events at a configurable time before they start as reminders.
Blueprint Preview: Try out the plugin in the WordPress Playground.
Event Sources: Fetch, cache, and display events from remote ActivityPub profiles.
Custom ActivityPub Preview: Improved visibility of how events appear in the Fediverse.
Admin Setting for Plain Text Summaries: Option to enforce plain-text event summaries.
Updated Dependencies: Now requires ActivityPub plugin version 5.1.0 or higher.
Bug Fixes & Admin UI Improvements: dozens of small fixes and refinements.Remaining Challenges
Despite this milestone, some interoperability issues remain. To point out a few:
Mastodon: Currently, Mastodon does not handle updates for Event objects. Issue #31114
Mobilizon’s customized ActivityPub dialect: Mobilizon was developed with the focus on federating with other Mobilizon instances. It is likely to reject everything it does not understand. Issue #1669.
Content warning & event summaries: Mastodon uses the summary property of ActivityPub for object types it doesn’t support natively. At the same time repurposed the summary property of ActivityPub together with the additional flag sensitive for content warnings. Thanks to the developers of Sharkey for the interesting discussions on this.
Instance following: Using FEP-2667 for to find an appropriate relay actor turned out not to be a good generic approach. While it works for Gancio or Mobilizon, a more complex system like WordPress has to fulfill more needs.
A common basis for using the Event object in ActivityPub: Finish FEP-8a8e and bring it to life.
Upstream ActivityPub plugin: The recent version 5.0.0 brought many improvements but also two critical bugs which limit what our plugin can do. Issue #1245 and #1269.
I hope that this release will be a significant step towards making events part of the Fediverse event ecosystem, and I’m excited to see how it develops! While I have new features and concrete improvements in mind, I’m most excited to hear feedback from users and see it in action.

2025-01-04 22:07:34

“Event Bridge For ActivityPub” plugin released on WordPress.org
It’s been a long road, but now a first version (v0.3.5) of the plugin is available via the official plugin sources on WordPress.org.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-bridge-for-activitypub/
Further features are almost ready and will follow in the coming days. This is includes some more complex features like aggregating events from other remote ActivityPub actors and improvements like better accessibility in the admin UI.
We are looking forward to feedback from users. You can find our guidelines for contributing here.
Unfortunately, interoperability with other applications is still limited, often caused by unresolved issues within other applications. However, we all are all working on it and are confident that things will be smoothed out in the course of this year!Migration to Codeberg
This was a good reason for us to move the repository from our self-hosted Forgejo to Codeberg.org for several reasons:
less maintenance
less hurdles to contribute
@nprofile…8x0h is awesome
we love Forgejo actions and can still use our own Forgejo-runnerAcknowledgement
We’d like to thank @nprofile…zzgr and @nprofile…klwf for allowing us to spend the considerable time we’ve put into developing this plugin.
#ActivityPub #codeberg #Events #WordPress

2024-12-17 16:12:15

Event Bridge for ActivityPub: Upcoming 1.0 Release
The 1.0 release of our WordPress plugin Event Bridge for ActivityPub is scheduled for early January 2025.Features based on evaluation results
Over the past year, the development plan for the 1.0 release of our WordPress plugin, Event Bridge for ActivityPub, has evolved significantly. After extensive testing and an evaluation process with real users, we’ve finalized the feature set for this upcoming release as follows:
Basic support for 10 widely-used WordPress event plugins.
Compatibility with multiple event plugins simultaneously, as we found that switching between plugins is common and maintaining archives is essential.
Event Aggregation from the Fediverse: follow other ActivityPub profiles to get and display their events. Will only be available with select event plugin integrations.
Map WordPress event categories to federated event categories, ensuring consistency across platforms.
Customizable event summaries for platforms like Mastodon that don’t natively support events in ActivityPub.
Send reminders (via Announce or custom Note) to followers at a configurable time before the event starts.
A streamlined admin dashboard that includes health checks and feedback to guide users to easily resolve faulty configurations.Security and accessibility review
A security and accessibility review is currently taking place, and we will also be adapting the results of this.
https://event-federation.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/banner-1544x500-1-1024x332.jpg

2024-10-27 20:10:30

Fediverse Enhancement Proposal in Progress
An initial draft for the FEP A common approach to using the Event object type has been published.
https://codeberg.org/linos/fep/src/branch/fep-8a8e/fep/8a8e/fep-8a8e.md
The pull request is still marked as work-in-progress. Firstly, we would like to have a discussion about it with the community, which you are invited to join on SocialHub.

2024-02-10 13:14:37

Fediversity at O₄FFDEM
Last weekend FOSDEM took place in Brussels, Belgium. However it was O₄FFDEM that provided the space for about 20 people to meet and discuss the future of events in the Fediverse for the whole Saturday. Among them developers like @lesion (developer of Gancio), setop (upcoming coordinator of Mobilizon), @dreirik (foss.events), @laurin (contributor to ActivityPods) and community members, (h)activists and event organizers like @becha or @eest9, just to name a few, and myself. Eventually, there were people from half of Europe: Montpellier, Strasbourg, Graz, Amsterdam, Italy, Vienna, Ljubljana, and Rotterdam.Expectations
It was impressive how, despite the number of people present, it was possible for the group to de facto moderate itself, in particular through the experienced careful intervention of a few at the right moments. We began with a short round of introductions, in which expectations for the day were also clarified. We first decided to talk about values, to clarify what needs and concerns are generally present. We were all united by the desire to become independent of Big Tech, although there were several completely different concepts of how this would be achieved from a single point of view in the mix.Dilemmas
It has become evident that in the case of events, from of a software developer’s point of view, one cannot simply speak of users, but must distinguish between organizers and participants, although the distinction can also be blurred in the case of a small community. Following dilemmas were identified:
regional vs global calendars
topical vs mixed calendars
aggregation vs autonomy
moderation vs censorshipAdvantages of a physical meeting
The discussion about these aspects was extensive and, admittedly, did not always seem to me to be very target-oriented. However, it was necessary to balance our different backgrounds and bring us up to the same level of knowledge and it became more concrete after the lunch break when we decided to compare and work out the intentions and use cases of the existing applications and developments in more detail. I could recap this in detail here, but I think it is best to write a stand-alone follow-up article. Each project has its own approach: some focus on local communities, some focus on private events an another wants to provide a way to organize larger political movements with as few social features as possible. On top of that, people have come up with use cases that no developer ever seemed to think of before.
One activist’s question, “What’s the difference between federation and interoperability?“, which had been floating around the room all day, was finally addressed in a satisfying way with examples. Even if all applications can successfully aggregate and display events of others, it does not mean that they respect all mechanisms that control how the event is listed, whether the event is joinable via ActivityPub, whether these joins have to be manually approved, whether some event details visibility have a certain scope, etc. Calendiverse
Perhaps one of the most important points was to enable the creation of event calendars, which are also aimed at people who do not want to have an account anywhere, but are simply looking for events. From the point of view of people looking for events, regional or topic-specific calendars are particularly important. Which events are aggregated and shown on an individual platform would be in the hands of the platform operators, which would then automatically play a major role in moderation.Why use ActivityPub?
ActivityPub covers most of the features iCal offers for creating calendars by aggregating multiple sources, but adds a few more:
Follow relationships become tangible
Social media like features:
Boosting
Liking
Replies
Push, not pull based
Joining (Participants management)
Use moderation and governance tools from the FediverseGetting to a Common Ground
Mobilizon has already introduced a huge set of custom properties and ways to manage event objects in the ActivityPub world. We decided on a process to re-evaluate their choices and draft a Fediverse Extension Proposal (FEP) for the least common set of them. What makes an event:
What: title, summary, content, etc.
When: start-time, end-time, timezone (for displaying), recursion
Where:
on/offline/hybrid
URL/location
Private locations which may be disclosed on participant’s acceptance
From Whom
To Whom: Public, Private, Unlisted
Why if not want to get listed just not “send” the event: e.g., Mobilizon -> federated groups -> federated private events
Let the sender of an event set the discoverability : the recipient might mistreat that
We decided to deal with advanced mechanisms such as sub-events, recurring events, irregularly rescheduled events in the future.Summary
All in all, it was simply nice to get to know each other and exchange ideas with other people who pursue common or similar goals. Especially the exchange between developers and non-developers, who were in the majority, was of great importance from my point of view. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to capture all the aspects in such a short recap. If you are missing something important, please have a comment. Many thanks to all of you, especially the organizers and those who were taking the meeting minutes.
#ActivityPub #Calendiverse #Fedivent #Fediversity #Gancio #Gathio #Mobilizon #OFFDEM #WordPress

2023-12-20 12:14:07

When writing the initial version of our project plan as signed and agreed with by NlNet we didn’t know yet about the dynamics of the community, specifically about how the cooperation between the maintainers of the #WordPress #ActivityPub plugin and #Mobilizon would be like. The level of collaboration with other #Fediverse developers would determine whether our project goals could only be achieved through a series of workarounds, or whether we could work together to strengthen interoperability and compatibility in the Fediverse.
Mobilizon was, until our project, the only Fediverse application with true event federation. #Gancio limits its ActivityPub capabilities to sending notes, but is working on a true federation of events, and other services like #Friendica have a very different approach to events: their implementation focuses on sending invitations rather than publishing events. As is usual with any software, you will find a lot of small bugs if you have not done any tests beforehand. In the case of Mobilizon, this was not possible since there were no alternative platforms to do the tests with, so the only option was to test the Federation with other Mobilizon servers. We seem to be the first and we are fascinated and incredibly grateful for the willingness and prioritization that such issues have among the other developers (thanks to tcit and les). The issues may seem small, but they have a big impact: #304 #33 #321 #1509 #1507 #1392 #1385 #1388 #1387 #1378 #1376.
The other deciding factor for us was that we didn’t know how close the interaction with the upstream WordPress AktivityPub project would be. The exchange of ideas and the desire for a joint solution is strong. We would like to thank @npub1psa…xhme again for the regular exchange, his ideas and inspiration, without his commitment to the community our project would be less sustainable.Tasks done (almost)
We published a repository that aims to make it easy for other developers, including ourselves to start developing and debugging WordPress along with Mobilizon.
We have created a pull request to add management of various ActivityPub transformers to the admin interface. The current implementation basically works, but we have a lot to polish and improve on our roadmap.
Using that patched ActivityPub plugin we explored writing transformers for two popular event plugins, this gave us a lot insight on what is important. These transformers already have fundamental compatibility with Moblizon.
Updating our About us page showing some information who we are.Upcoming tasks
Implement FEP-2677: Identifying the Application Actor
Implement the followers list of the application actor in the admin UI along with the ability to reject, approve, and remove followers. We are very inspired by how #PeerTube has solved this in the admin UI. This of course includes a an option as:manuallyApprovesFollowers that can be set for an ActivityPub actor within WordPress.
Write an initial draft of the user documentation informing about custom ActivityPub transformers and instance-to-instance federation with Mobilizon. The target audience will be non-tech people. Parts of this will also be used as a non-tech description of our project.
Improve the admin UI and propose a solution to handle the settings for each transformer, if there are any.
Write more transformers for other popular event plugins to discover common pitfalls.
If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to help us, for example by testing our progress yourself if your operate a WordPress site with events, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We don’t care if you have technical experience or what your background is: any kind of involvement is valuable to us.
https://event-federation.eu/2023/12/20/it-is-all-about-the-community/
#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Friendica #Gancio #Mobilizon #PeerTube #WordPress