28 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
28 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown
# Glossary
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Some commonly-used terms in discussions of federation, and their meanings.
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### `ActivityPub`
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A decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams data format. See [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/).
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GoToSocial uses the ActivityPub protocol to communicate between GtS servers, and with other federated servers like Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.
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### `ActivityStreams`
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A model/data format for representing potential and completed activities using JSON. See [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/).
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GoToSocial uses the ActivityStreams data model to 'speak' ActivityPub with other servers.
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### `Actor`
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An actor is an ActivityStreams object that is capable of performing some Activity like following, liking, creating a post, reblogging, etc. See [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#actors).
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In GoToSocial, each account/user is an actor.
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### `Dereference`
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To 'dereference' a post or a profile means to make an HTTP call to the server that hosts that post or profile, in order to obtain its ActivityStreams representation.
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GoToSocial 'dereferences' posts and profiles on remote servers, in order to convert them to models that GoToSocial can understand and work with.
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