Inbox persistence

The federation package stores accepted remote resources through packages/federation/src/inbox-persist.ts. Transport observations are recorded separately, as described in activity deliveries.

The inbox listeners store a received Create in activities, with its remote actor and object, when:

• it has an ID, and its actor is not a local actor, whose activities DrFed stores as it sends them;
• its object is a Note or an Article with an ID on the origin of the actor, attributed to the actor, and with content, as FEP-fe34 requires of an object its actor creates;
• its actor has an inbox;
• its text holds neither U+0000 nor an unpaired surrogate, which PostgreSQL would refuse or alter; the delivery keeps such text as received; and
• createInboundRecorder() recorded the request, which tells the listener what the request carried and when it arrived.

An IRI already stored is kept as it is: a Create received again, or by several instances, is stored once, and nothing it carries is written then, even an object that has not been stored yet. One that claims another actor's object or an IRI of another kind is not stored. The activity is stored as received, whatever terms its context uses. If DrFed's loadObject() helper fetches the object, DrFed stores the fetched object's serialization. Otherwise, it stores the embedded object as received, searching at most 64 candidate locations in the activity and expanding the document once for each. Expansion only identifies the received node; the stored value is the original JSON. If that search cannot locate the embedded object, the object is stored without its document; the activity's document still retains the embedded value. A remote actor's username is its preferredUsername, which may be missing.

Fedify authenticates an activity before answering it with 2xx, and Fedify 2.4.3 or later refuses one whose ID is on another origin than its actors, so every inbound delivery that was verified and answered with 2xx is linked to the stored activity its ID names, a duplicate Fedify skips included. An outbound delivery is linked to the activity it sends.

The serializers exported by @drfed/federation/object are shared by GraphQL mutations and ActivityPub dispatchers. Load rows with the matching selection before serializing them, so stored documents and served objects agree.

Accepted legacy writers also capture retained history in the same transaction. See resource revisions for the difference between current typed rows, retained snapshots and delivery receipts.