Setting up an ActivityPub Actor

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

This topic covers setting up an ActivityPub Actor in Discourse with the Discourse ActivityPub Plugin. If you’re not sure what this means, head on over to the Discourse ActivityPub Plugin topic first.

Next Step

How to follow an ActivityPub Actor

This topic covers following an ActivityPub Actor in Discourse with the Discourse ActivityPub Plugin, and follows on from “How to set up an ActivityPub Actor”. If you’re not sure what this means, head on over to the Discourse ActivityPub Plugin topic first. Instructions To follow an ActivityPub Actor: Set up an actor for the Category or Tag you want to do the following. Get the “handle” of the Actor you want to follow (see below). Go to the “Federation” tab in the topic list view of the Cate…

Instructions

To create an ActivityPub actor:

1. Go to Admin > Plugins > ActivityPub.
2. Click “Add Actor”.
3. Fill out the Add Actor form (the settings are explained below).
4. Click “Save Actor”.

When you save the Actor, other Actors in the fediverse can start following it. You can disable an actor, by toggling the “Enabled” toggle on the right of the Edit Actor view.

Actor settings

Username

This is the first part of the Actor’s ActivityPub handle, e.g. announcements is the username of announcements@meta.discourse.org. This will be the base for the Actor’s User’s username on remote Discourse instances (if the username is already taken on that instance, an integer will be added for uniqueness)

This property translates to the preferredUsername in the ActivityPub specification.
Currently, this cannot be changed once set. This will change if or when this PR to Mastodon is merged.

Add Update Actor preferredUsername support

Name

This is the display name of the Actor. How it is used will depend on how other services implement it. In Discourse this will become the Actor’s User’s “Name”.

Visibility

This determines whether Activities published by the Actor have “Public Addressing”. You should leave this as public unless you know what you’re doing.

This is essentially the same as the difference between “public” and “private” (followers-only) posts on on Mastodon.

Post object type

This determines whether the Actor will publish posts as a Note or an Article. You should leave this as Note unless you know what you’re doing.

Mastodon will only publish a link to the original post if it receives an Article.

Publication type

Full Topic

All the posts in a topic associated with the Actor will be published and all replies from the Fediverse to be turned into posts.

First Post

Only the first post in a topic associated with the Actor will be published and no replies from the Fediverse will be turned into posts.