What exactly does it mean to be Usenet-like, in terms of a Fediverse experience?
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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@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.
Well, an instance is only going to have access to the data that's federated to it, which I'm pretty sure was the same situation with Usenet.
It sounds like your issue has to do with Mastodon's lack of full-text search, perhaps?
@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.
I'm sorry, I still don't quite follow what you want. What does it mean to access the entire Fediverse?
Usenet propagates all messages to every server (unless the receiving server specifically blocks a newsgroup or hierarchy). Messages originate at a specific server, but they're copied everywhere.
The Fediverse, in its current state, stores each message on only one server. It will provide a pointer to a given message to another server only if the other server asks for it.
In theory, you could copy all communities and messages from every server yours is federated with onto your home server for a more Usenet-like effect. If you did that, you would be able to view the whole set of communities and messages from your home server even if no one there had subscribed to them yet. In practice no one does that. Yet.
I suspect the best way of achieving what the original poster wants is to copy the community list and message text content, but leave any embedded media on the originating server—text is low-bandwidth, so you could probably fit the entire Fediverse's daily production of same into the bandwidth required for a couple of hours of 4K Netflix.
The Usenet model does seem a better fit for Lemmy than the current setup, because community discovery here is kind of painful, really.
@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.
Upon further consideration, the smart way to do this would be to have the servers exchange community lists, with post subjects and other metadata. That's enough information to find and evaluate a community. Post bodies and comments can then be fetched on request.
Putting all the data in the client strikes me as more bandwidth-inefficient, but whether that matters these days is questionable. Usenet clients don't download subject lines from the server until after you subscribe to a group, but that's a relic of the days of modems whose speed was measured in baud. And of course it's always easier to start your own project than try to fork the existing server code. Not to mention that I haven't bothered to look at the API yet, so my thinking may be way off-base.
Plus, I get the impression that the existing clients are half-baked, so the more the merrier. ;)
@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.
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.
NNTP gate would be a cool thing to have, imagine posting via Gnus/Emacs like 20 years ago.