ACTIVITYSUB
Subscribe to the fediverse.

The primary goal of ActivitySub is to create an cross-platform, agnostic
ActivityPub client which gives a best-effort for consuming all ActivityPub
content.

Its invocation name is "activitysub", and on its own will fetch all personal
inbox messages, subscribed outbox messages, and allow for sending messages
to the fediverse.

1. INSTALLATION

There may be an installation script included with this software. Select the
script which has the name of your operating system, such as linux-install.sh
or windows-install.bat, otherwise read the following.

Have "activitysub" run on start-up. Don't know how? Once again research how for
your operating system.

1.2 CONFIGURATION

Place a ".activitysub.conf" file in your user directory (research where this
is for your operating system) which contains:

  username: activitypub-username-with-domain
  password: activitypub-password
  extract attachments: true (or false)
  poll once every: 6 seconds (or minutes, or hours, or days)
  stagger polling by: 2 seconds (or minutes)

The one option that probably needs some explanation is stagger polling: this is
to prevent all updates happening at the same time, preventing a resource spike.

Staggering allows the messages to still be read in parallel instead of in
sequence. The option should be adjusted to account for your network behavior.

If it's set to 0, everything will be read in sequence.

2. USAGE

Open your email client of choice to add the local mail server to your list
of email accounts.

ActivitySub will translate SMTP messages into ActivityPub messages.

Incoming ActivityPub messages will be stored into a Maildir which is read by
email clients like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.

3. GOALS

3.1 TECHNICAL GOALS

The main techological goals which come to my mind, which I think are universally
useful, are the following:

  * Run on "majority" shareholder operating systems and POSIX-compatible, which
    means Windows, Android and Linux/*BSD/etc.
  * Use technology which will have at least a 10 year life span.
  * Buildable with 1 command.
  * Vendor its dependencies such that they never expire.
  * Written in a style which is easy to read, and not necessarily optimized.
  * Must use a reasonably efficient language.

3.2 USER GOALS

The main user goals I think are pretty straight forward:

  * Setup must be as simple as possible
  * All ActivityPub content must be viewable in some manner
  * All ActivityPub activities must be possible to create
  * The implementation must absolutely not drain resources
  * It must be easy to delete and wipe all application data
  * The application must only send requests to the user's respective server
  * It must have a name which reflects what the software does.
 
The above should cover privacy and efficiency concerns.

4. TECHNOLOGY

It's been decided that Standard ML is the language of this implementation. You
can read why in the 100-years.txt file.

The Maildir format for storing messages is extremely well suited and supported
by many email clients. This allows users to use familiar and suitable interfaces
to interact with the ActivityPub universe.