# ActivityPub <-> Secure Scuttlebutt Gateway

There's a lot of overlap between the communities of users between the fediverse (ActivityPub) and Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). People for years have asked about creating a gateway so you could follow / reply / message back and forth between the two protocols.

This is a working document to outline how we might create a gateway service which could be run if you wanted to bride the two.

SSB is a peer to peer gossip protocol where users write messages to a signed log and it's synced without any federated servers. Where as the fediverse uses servers for hosting user content and accounts.

## Example bridges / gateways

There are a number gateway services for both scuttlebutt and AP.

SSB gateways generally run by importing ssb content from other sources like rss, in to secure scuttlebutt feeds. Individuals run a gateway which pulls in content, and writes to an ssb log which is then available to be read by peers. Most SSB gateways do not tackle the issue of messages going the other direction.

On the AP side, there are many bridges / relays to work from for an example:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-activitypub-development/#user-content-bridges

## Implementation Thoughts

A fediverse user is represented by an account on an a server. A scuttlebutt user is represented as an identity (ed25519 public key).

What we probably want is a service where it presents to both sides with a mapping between fediverse account and ssb identity. That server would hold the ssb secret on behalf of the user. Users would need to opt in to the gateway, setting a fediverse username and scuttlebutt about messages. Each ssb post would be pulled in and made available to peers on the fediverse. In the other direction, the gateway could be set to mirror all posts of a user, say @[e-mail] in to a specific ssb identity.

Mauve wrote up thoughts on AP <-> p2p bridges https://blog.mauve.moe/posts/federated-to-p2p

### Open Issues
* How would replies work for users across the gateway.
* How do you publish follow messages, join pubs / rooms for the ssb identity hosted with the gateway.
* ....

### Funding
[Planetary](https://planetary.social) is offering to fund the development work of this app as an independent open source project. Details about scope and the project need to be worked out, but we're open to proposals and looking for people who want to take it on.