@evilviper I've actually gone ahead and begun work despite lack of discovery. https://github.com/JustusW/UnifiedFediverseObserver
Early stages, but I already can go through linked relations in many cases.
@retiolus @fediverse no correction necessary. You buy it, you make the rules. Quite a simple concept that many a Karen doesn't seem to understand.
@retiolus @fediverse you're overstating the importance of the few loud and annoying cretins that think being clueless makes their opinions especially valuable. All I can see here is people belittling the work of those driving the fediverse and making up arbitrary and brainless rules on the spot that have been known as toxic, ridiculous and untenable in FOSS for decades...
@Hexorg can't directly reply to your comment because that wasn't federated (oh the sweet irony) :D
Anyway, it's more like I'm trying to write a usenet reader, fully expecting to have to create a curated list of of instances but then finding out there is no way to see what any given instance actually contains outside of writing specific code for each and every one of them.
@Hexorg I've begun yesterday with the question "why can't I access information without first having to know where it is?" I've now basically gone through confusion, anger, disbelieve and now acceptance that there really is nothing to find. In the end the concept of federation says that stuff should be accessible from anywhere. But it isn't. Which is a pretty big problem imo.
My goal is to indeed create a generic fediverse reader, not using any specific platform APIs.
@admin "all" is a pretty tall order, but I have been reading both the lemmy, mastodon, activitypub and several other documentations to get a feel for dataflow and presentation. I'm sort of baffled by this shortfall. The expectation for something "implementing ActivityPub" would be that I can access the target instance to a usable degree with it. Right now that is definitely not the case. There is no way to get a list of communities, so with only "beehaw.org" known I have no way to find anything.
@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...
Understanding ActivityPub and Federation
I have tried to understand how Federation works but I'm getting a feeling that there's some rather large gaps here. My first attempt was to find an API implementation in python, 3 wasted hours of my life later and I'm making requests.request() calls like it's 2007. And I still can't access the content as presented on the webinterfaces. There doesn't seem to be a way to access eg the communities tab via activitypub? Any Help?
@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.
@nyan @leopardboy that. Although even accessing federated content on demand would work. There's no technical reason to limit what you display to the user to one instance. If I want to access lemmy.cafe from mastodon.social why is that not possible? It's federated, so I should be able to do that. The API definitely allows it, as seen in this thread. The User Interface just doesn't deal with it. I understand the limitations at play quite well, which is why I'm thinking dedicated client.
@leopardboy not as such. I just want a way to access the entire fediverse from one tool, warts and all. I assume such a thing doesn't exist. Yet. A state I will probably begin working on momentarily.
@leopardboy I'm coming from the PoV of accessing it. Every fediverse compatible instance is just another store of messages. Technically I have part of this, I'm writing this very reply on mastodon.social, but I can't explore beehaw.org unless I leave mastodon.social and go there. Basically it would mean treating the instance you work from as just an email account while showing compatible content from any source and allowing you to interact with it as is.
@technology Is there a Usenet like app/website/whatever of the Fediverse? So, I've sort of grown up in the Usenet, and this whole Federation thing sort of feels very reminiscent of it. To the point where I'm wondering why there isn't a way to access it in this fashion? Any tips would be very helpful. I love the idea of this thing and would probably even begin running my own server if that becomes viable.
