it would be good to have a simple tool to view activitypub content. like user profiles, posts, etc.

this is because there are sometimes federation issues (posts show up on one instance, but not on the other). it would be good to have a better understanding of what is happening there, maybe by having a simple tool to see what is actually being transmitted over the AP protocol. like, if i open my own user profile from mastodon, it only shows me about half the posts that i actually make. why is that? it would be good to see whether the data is actually correctly sent from the lemmy server, or if it's just wrongly interpreted on the mastodon side of things.

maybe something like activitypub-read "https://feddit.org/u/gandalf_der_12te" and it shows you something like that:

Check out this one:
https://github.com/fedify-dev/drfed
I haven't tested it yet, but looks promising. Devs are the same who made Fedify framework for building activitypub apps.

https://browser.pub for opening any ActivityPub post, actor, etc
https://activitypub.academy for seeing workings of the protocol in real time

thank you, that was precisely what i was looking for! :D

edit: huh that's weird. both projects don't display anything for my feed (outbox) for https://feddit.org/u/gandalf_der_12te account. meanwhile mastodon instance (wien.rocks) shows half the posts and on lemmy i can see all of them.

Your outbox is factually empty. I assume this is because Lemmy doesn't see a reason to populate it. You can't follow Lemmy users, so there's no reason for another platform to want to directly fetch your past posts.

Other instances of course know your posts because you send them to them when you submit them. They don't need to ask the outbox. And your own instance doesn't need to ask an outbox either, it can just ask the database directly.

But these tools probably aren't instances, they just fetch your outbox directly. So since the outbox is empty, and you never send them anything, they have no posts of yours.

if i open my own user profile from mastodon, it only shows me about half the posts that i actually make.

That is normal, its usually because no one on that instance follows your user profile specifically. Part of your posts are federated because someone is following a subset of the communities where you are posting.

You can follow Lemmy users from Mastodon etc. But the outbox isnt even used by Mastodon, so we havent bothered to implement it properly yet.