this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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@nyan couple of hours of research in and I'm baffled. There is no apparent mechanism for discovery in ActivityPub.
It appears as if the protocol has simply ignored the literal first step of all social interaction: Observation.
Take lemmy as an example, if I visit beehaw.org directly I can click on "Communities" and get a list of them. Yet, there is no way I could identify to get this via ActivityPub. I'm completely and utterly baffled.
@JustusWingert
@technology @leopardboy @nyan
My guess is that this actually regarded as a feature in the wider #fediverse. At least in the Mastodon community it is. Toots not being searchable/indexed and you discover topics and people to follow by looking for hashtags and organically setup and control your own home feed. This, leading to much frustration for many who've moved over from Twitter.
Reasons being that it should not be easy for big tech (and others) to just slurp up and make peoples data open publicly for a wider audience through public search engines. A level of privacy and owning ones own data has been a priority over the inconvenience of not being as discoverable.
Of course the same thinking does not apply or map equally well to the #threadiverse as it does to Mastodon. I'm sure there are workarounds and a way to make this more seamless for users, but this is just getting started. It was never an issue when everything was on a small number of instances which everyone knew about.
A quick skim of the protocol documents suggests you're right: Activity Vocabulary doesn't even mention the "discovery" use case, and no allowance seems to have been made for it. I can't fathom what they were thinking.
The short-term workaround would be scraping the Web portal "Communities > Local" page of each instance periodically for a list (and cache the info centrally? Not sure.) Hopefully the raw HTML is parsable enough that you wouldn't have to involve Selenium (which I've used in my day job—it's awful) or its ilk.
The correct fix is, of course, to add the "discovery" case and messages supporting it to the protocol, either as an extension or as core for the next version. This might take years.
It might be worth asking browse.feddit.de how they get their information.
@nyan so it's not only me missing the elephant in the room. O_o
That's a pretty huge gap. Which has severe consequences all the way down the pipe...
There's a current issue with lemmy with comments not being synchronized properly. Possibly a direct consequence of the entire system replication being push with no backup pull or reconciliation in the protocol.
I'm looking into a couple directions right now, but this is completely breaking the foundational promise of the very concept of fediverse...
It's possible that if you're trying to build a Twitter substitute on top of the protocol, the issue looks like a mere Sicilian dwarf elephant, since Twitter doesn't have great discoverability either (or need it, really), and synchronization hiccups matter less for that kind of service. It's when you're trying to build a Reddit/Usenet substitute that things fall down.
But yeah, it really is a gap in the design.