The long-awaited developer offering from the Pixelfed project took a big step today! PubKit is a suite of tools designed to help people build the next generation of Fediverse applications. For now, it can be broken down into four components:

Faker

Faker brings the power to create placeholder Actors, with mocked-up data, allowing developers to see what interactions actually look like on their server in real time.

Fetch

Fetch is, more or less, the Webfinger tool we all know and love. Instead of rendering an Activity, though, it instead shows you the JSON of what that Activity looks like.

Bouncer

Bouncer gives developers the ability to look at HTTP Signatures, which are used to sign messages, and determine what’s different from one implementation to the next.

Radar

Radar lets developers create a temporary inbox, allowing them to see how new Activities come in, and what the data behind them looks like.

The best part of this thing is that, like Pixelfed’s other efforts, PubKit aims to be 100% Free and Open Source. They even included a pricing page as an easter egg, to drive the point home.

We just signed up for the Beta to test it out with our own clearly-real-and-not-fake app, Womp Triangle, and are excited to take a deeper tour once we get in. According to Dansup, PubKit intends to open up to the general public within the coming month. For the time being, though, he was nice enough to share a few screenshots.

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