1honk spec
 2
 3-- references
 4
 5See security.txt for some notes on security.
 6
 7See ping.txt for a proposed Ping extension to ActivityPub.
 8
 9-- retries
10
11If a message can't be delivered, we backoff and retry.
12
131 - five minutes later in case the servce restarted
142 - one hour later in case the server rebooted
153 - 12 more hours later in case the server was upgraded
164 - 24 more hours later in case there was a catastrophe
175 - it's dead.
18
19A random drift of up to 10% is added to each delay to avoid swarming.
20
21-- federating
22
23Messages are transformed for federation and display. Some transformations
24occur send side and some occur receive side because it's more exciting that
25way. @mentions and *markdown* are converted to HTML before transmission.
26Message :emoji: are converted to inline images after receiving.
27
28Up to four parents of a reply will be fetched.
29
30Attachments for received messages are rescaled before saving.
31
32-- schema
33
34Some notes on the database schema. Mostly for development, but maybe useful
35for administration as well.
36
37The config table contains settings, some of which may not be editable via the
38normal interface.
39
40For development purposes, adding a config value ('debug', 1) to the database
41will disable caching and hot reload the templates. It's not meant to be
42harmful in production, just less efficient.
43
44We don't use null, only empty strings. This is easier to work with on the go
45side.
46
47The main table is honks. This stores both locally created honks and incoming
48ActivityPub notes converted to honks. It is important to differentiate the two
49cases so that we don't accidentally publish external honks in the public web
50view. (Previously this was accomplished via separate tables. That made some
51queries more difficult, but I think it's possible to workaround this. It would
52be considerably safer.) The honker column will be empty for local honks.
53
54The what column further refines the type of honk. If a reply, tonk. If
55deleted, zonk. If shared, bonk. In particular for the case of bonk, there
56aren't enough columns to store original honker and bonker. This seems to work
57out okay though.
58
59Attachments are physically saved as files, and logically joined to honks via
60the donks table. Emus are saved as donks as well.
61
62The honkers table is used to manage follows and followers. The flavor column
63describes what. 'sub' is a follow. We have subscribed to their newsletter.
64'dub' is a follower. They get dubbed whenever we honk.
65
66The xonkers table stores info about external accounts that we may interact
67with. Their keys, their inboxes, etc. Not user visible.
68
69The zonkers table stores things we do not wish to see, per the wherefore
70column. zonkers are bad people, zurls are bad hosts, zonvoys are bad threads.
71
72The xid column generally corresponds to ActivityPub id. For local honks, it
73will be a short string, not a complete URL.
74
75Note that some logical seeming joins won't work. The honker column of honks
76does not have a corresponding entry in the honkers table, since we frequently
77receive messages from people we don't follow. Should we track everybody whose
78identity crosses our path? This seems unnecessary. The honkers table is more
79like a mapping of active relationships, not a directory of all peoples.
80
81Some deduping of honks is performed. This may not be perfect.