What would it take for HN to become ActivityPub compatible?

What would it take for HN to become ActivityPub compatible?

I do not foresee this happening. The moderation and voting would require a significant level of trust of the other instances, admins and moderators. Being associated with other multi-media sites introduces legal risks I would be surprised if a VC was willing to take on. Assuming you mean a bi-directional integration into ActivityPub

That said one could run something like HN and moderate it independently. Maybe Postmill [1a][1b]. There are other sites that ingest data from HN's API [2] for search, statistical analytics, etc... Something similar could probably be done that would be ingested read-only into ActivityPub from another site but I would be quite surprised to see this site implement ActivityPub directly. I don't know what the API rate limits are for this site or if Mastodon could operate within them.

[1a] - https://postmill.xyz/

[1b] - https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill

[2] - https://github.com/HackerNews/API

I started following an HN repost bot on Mastodon this morning.

What's missing is comments from AP being ingested/posted to HN, the upvote/downvote federation story, and the moderation story.

Has @dang commented on this question in the past? Has anyone shown a potential HN source patch?

Where is the HN source code right now? Free and Open?

I somewhat remember there being some ok nntp/Usenet mirroring pieces of software. Those probably do a ton of work to mirror the threads here well!

I'd start with that, and then just build something that spins out feeds of each user.