Huh? What's an Activity Intent?

It is a proposal by @benpate@mastodon.social that aims to "extend the capabilities of an ActivityPub server beyond a user's outbox, and enable direct interactions with content on the wider social web."

In other words, it allows you to more seamlessly use your fediverse account on other sites without having to register a new account just to contribute.

In even simpler words, it means you can go to other forums and interact with content without needing to register a new account.

It directly tackles one of the fediverse "hard problems" I talked about last year — account fragmentation. You won't need additional accounts just to use other sites, your identity stays whole <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://community.nodebb.org/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f60e.png?v=14b798222a5" title="" />

Let's learn more about how that works!

Account Fragmentation in a Nutshell

Right now, when you browse to a different site, you usually have to create a new account to interact with it. For example, if you check out someone's Pixelfed profile, you're not able to comment or like their pictures without an account there. This has always been how the internet worked, and before the advent of single sign-on, which lets you log in with a different account (but still creates a new account on that site), that was just how it was.

Essentially, there was no way to interact with content using your main identity. The workarounds were numerous... copying URLs, searching for the account on your instance, etc. All of which were fairly friction-heavy, so the next best thing was just to create a local account and fragment your identity.

Activity Intents intends (ha!) to address this by allowing servers to advertise support for different types of social actions.

How It Works

1. You browse to another site and want to carry out an action, such as liking the post, or writing a reply.
2. That site asks you to enter an Open Social Web handle (or log in, if you have a local account), and you enter it.
3. It then queries your server to see what Intents it supports (e.g. "Like", "Create")
4. If there's a match, it sends you back to your server, where you can complete the action.

That's about it! There are additional details about designing the actual flow, and how to "remember" each visitor's social web handle, but the basics are as listed above.

What it looks like in NodeBB

We've integrated support for four intents:

1. Like/Dislike → These map to upvote and downvote respectively
2. Create → These would be topic creations and replies
3. Follow → self-explanatory
4. Object → Load an ActivityPub resource in NodeBB

We integrated two-way support which means that if you land on a NodeBB and your fediverse account supports Activity Intents, then you can simply hit like, reply, or follow from NodeBB, and be sent back to your home server, all without the hassle of copying and pasting links into a search bar.

Integrating Activity Intents was a high-impact way to tackle the problem of account fragmentation. Users of NodeBB (whose forums have updated to v4.12.0) should not have to feel pressure to create local accounts elsewhere if the site they end up on supports Activity Intents as well.