ActivityPub/Primer/Remove activity

A Remove activity is used to remove an object from a collection.

The object being removed is the object, and the collection being modified is the target. Note that this is different than the definition in the Activity Vocabulary; the ActivityPub spec varies from the Activity Vocabulary spec in this regard.

ActivityPub API

The Remove activity type can remove an object from a collection.

Typically, only the creator of the collection can remove objects from it. However, an actor may remove objects created by other authors from their own collection.

ActivityPub protocol

The Remove activity type can remove an object from a collection.

However, most collections are only editable by the creator. (However, see https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/400e/fep-400e.md for a mechanism for defining publicly-editable collections.)

Therefore, Remove activities will usually be received only for collections owned by other actors on other servers. Therefore, there is not much to be done with a Remove activity when it is received.

If the receiving server is keeping a cached version of the remote collection, it has two possible actions to take when an Remove is received:

• It can update the cached version of the collection.
• It can invalidate the cached version, and re-fetch it from originating server if it is requested in the future.