Comment by gargron
4 years ago
To allow people to review their followers before accepting them ("follow requests") all subscriptions in ActivityPub require the followed actor to send back an Accept activity. This, and the Webfinger requirement to confirm the username@domain address that predates ActivityPub, preclude plain static sites from being followable actors as seen from Mastodon. Although nothing prevents you from publishing a static feed in the ActivityStreams format, this would require a different, feed-like subscription mechanism where the publisher is not aware of subscribers and the subscriber has to poll the publisher periodically.
"Follow requests" are typically used for sharing private posts in existing social networks: that's why there is a "request and accept" flow. They seem like they should be irrelevant to users who only post content publicly. Does Mastodon require users with public posts to "approve" each of their subscribers?
Not in the UI unless the user's enabled it, but ActivityPub server implementations send an Accept activity in response to a Follow activity.
Seems like GP is right then about some tweaks being advisable. There's no reason why ActivityPub servers should not be able to poll and republish ActivityStreams pages if the server admin arranges for this.
Yes. These are all assumptions of the sort that I'm saying would need to be (and should be) adjusted (i.e. fixed)—in Mastodon and ActivityPub, to better accommodate static nodes (not for the relevant desiderata to be adjusted to accommodate what's currently wrong with the design that Mastodon implements).