I (Evan) will be at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 in Milan, Italy this weekend (May 1-4). I’m especially interested in how we can connect Wikimedia projects and content to the Social Web using ActivityPub. I’ll be holding a session on the topic on Sunday May 3 at 9AM, but I’ll also be available for discussions throughout the weekend.
My hacking project plan is to make an ActivityPub object server for films. There are about 343,000 films in Wikidata, which compares pretty favourably with the 740,000 films in IMDB. There is a JSON-LD interface to Wikidata, but the types used don’t match up with ActivityPub types like Video. So, like places.pub, I’ll set up movies.pub to share an ActivityPub object for every Q-item for a movie, as well as a search endpoint to find films by name.
If I get ahead of the project and I’m not too jet-lagged, I’d like to add an ActivityPub API app to “check in” to a movie that you’re watching (and maybe give a little review). Similar to checkin.swf.pub with places!
If you’re at #wmhack this weekend, please come say hi. I love talking about Wikimedia projects and the open social web.
Hey, all! I’m seeking some help testing an application I whipped up for the Geosocial task force of the W3C Social Web Community Group. It’s called https://checkin.swf.pub/ , and it’s a barebones checkin service, similar to Swarm, but implemented as a pure Web client. You can watch the application in action.
It logs into your account on an ActivityPub server using OAuth 2.0. It then reads your inbox, filtering the activities there to only show geosocial ones. You can use the geolocation services in the browser, and the places.pub service for a place vocabulary, to find nearby places. You can then “check in” to one of the places, with a note, and control of the privacy of the activity.
Geosocial activities are part of the core Activity Vocabulary that underlies ActivityPub. But, they’re not as widely implemented as other activities in the vocabulary. This app is trying to change that, by making them available on the network, and making it easy to create them.
To test the client, your service will need to support:
To test federation, your service will need to support:
As of this writing, Mastodon does not work for either of these. If you want to test receiving federated messages, follow me on evan@onepage.pub . I’ve been using it a lot!
Code for the checkin application is here: https://github.com/social-web-foundation/checkin
This is my second ActivityPub API client (ap, the command-line client, was my first), and my first one for the Web. I found this process really fun and invigorating. I was able to create a new kind of social networking application (well, new on the Fediverse…) purely from the client side. The app saves no data to the server; everything is done in the browser.
Please reach out on GitHub or comment here if you want to work on interoperability. I’m happy to help debug connections if needed.
Social Web Foundation