Autofill from ActivityPub

[danirabbit]

Problem

There’s currently no way to set an avatar during initial setup

Proposal

It would be pretty neat if you could put in an ActivityPub handle and have avatar downloaded, plus maybe real name, and username fields pre-filled

Prior Art (Optional)

Other operating systems have online accounts where user data is stored like iCloud or a Microsoft account

[darltrash]

I looked into this issue for a while, and we really only have two options as far as I am aware.:

1. Manage different services manually

Use the Mastodon API OAuth for authentication, as well as Misskey's API for OAuth, and so on. This is the most extensible option since we can just keep adding methods for other social media or identity providers in case it's necessary or a lot of people want a certain service to be supported. The issue here would be that we would need to spawn some webkit stuff like the GOA, which is very complex.

2. Relays

We could use a relay, such as an existing instance, or some thin server hosted on elementaryOS' infrastructure, which would allow us to essentially "federate" with other instances and ask them for specific users. (This is necessary since we cannot actually fetch raw ActivityPub data without a "signature")

[cyrneko]

we could, of course, pull a fedify-CLI type move where there's no oAuth at all, just a single signed HTTP request using a little relay server on a throwaway subdomain

though, I feel that's a bit hacky and won't scale well, considering that'd be an extra expense on a server and bandwidth

[darltrash]

mastodon.elementary.io when /j