ActivityPub self-hosted isn't quite federating

Developer help Self-hosting
1

Hi, I’m trying to complete a Ghost self-hosted installation with Docker, including ActivityPub. The website is working but the ActivityPub part is having problems. @selecteh@selecteh.org can be seen from Mastodon, and I can see my own Mastodon handles from the Network UI, but…

  • If I follow @selecteh@selecteh.org from Mastodon, first my Mastodon account says “Following” but then it says “Cancel request”. From Network I keep seeing “0 followers” and I see no way to handle follow requests.
  • If I follow my Mastodon account from Ghost, I do see on Mastodon the notification “… is following you”. But Netwrok keeps showing “Following 0” so I’m not sure it is working.
  • If I post notes from Ghost, they appear in Notes but my Mastodon account can’t see them. The same happens if I publish a full post, it appears in the Notes but I can’t see it from Mastodon.
  • If I publish toots from Mastodon mentioning @selecteh@selecteh.org publicly or privately, I don’t get any notifications in Network.

docker logs ghost-activitypub-1 spits out many warnings and some errors:

  • There are plenty of WRN fedify·federation·http: 'POST' '/.ghost/activitypub/inbox/index': 401
  • Also some WRN fedify·federation·http: 'GET' '/.ghost/activitypub/inbox/index': 404
  • These come whenever I post a note: ERR activitypub: Error updating interaction counts for post with ID 12: 'post-is-internal'

I have followed the steps in the Docker installation guide, which are quite simple when it comes to the ActivityPub part. From my env file:

COMPOSE_PROFILES=activitypub

(…)

ACTIVITYPUB_TARGET=activitypub:8080

I have searched this forum and beyond for answers, unsuccessfully. Can you help me figure out what is going on, please?

2

Ok, we don’t know where else to look. Everything seems to be fine, unless there is a prerequisite assumed in the documentation that we are missing. Like, do we need to install an ActivityPub server or is there one included in the Ghost Docker release?

I have commented “# ACTIVITYPUB_TARGET=activitypub:8080” in the env and everything seems to work fine now… We wanted to self-host ActivityPub as well just to save some bits to Ghost’s ActivityPub infrastructure and be 100% autonomous but we have many other things to prepare for the launch.

We hope the migration of ActivityPub server is simple if one day we want to change to self-hosted. I don’t think we’ll hit the 2000 followers cap. It would be a good problem to have. :)

3

I’m still without Activitypub because I do not want to use a different endpoint but my own stack.

If someone was able to do it, I will appreciate the guideline.