TryGhost / TryGhost/ActivityPub

Discovering actor ID

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enhancement
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
237
Forks
35
Avg merge
1d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
60

Description

There is no way to discover the actor ID from author's profile (/author/<username>). Many Fediverse platforms redirect to an actor document if Accept header specifies the ActivityPub media type, but not Ghost.

One can try to guess the actor ID using the https://<domain>/.ghost/activitypub/users/<username> template, but this is not reliable. It seems to work only when the username is index, in other cases an invalid actor document is returned. The username is not checked, by the way, and document is returned even if the user doesn't exist. Here's an example: https://activitypub.ghost.org/.ghost/activitypub/users/wowsuchactor

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the author's profile route (/author/<username>) and its handling of ActivityPub Accept media types. Done means an existing username can expose a valid actor document through content negotiation, while nonexistent usernames are not served as valid actors; verify the behavior against the example URL and the ActivityPub media type.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
api
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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