Underrated comment.
julian
joined 2 months ago
Everyone's hilariously ragging on OP for setting up a federated instance with dubious uptime, and I'm sittin' here thinking that it just reminds me of me when I was a young kid hacking around with software.
Back then I set up a mediawiki server with very dubious uptime. Was fun 😂
Sure, although those terms are buzzwords only, not marketing speak. Like blogiverse, definitely not marketing.
The marketing term the Social Web Foundation wants to put forward is "Open Social Web", but that encompasses more than the threaded softwares (includes Mastodon, Peertube, etc.)
Threadiverse ftw
I mean, yes, but there's also an implicit social contract with fediverse software that you probably shouldn't scrape without federating back...?
Hey suff@piefed.social let me share what I've been working on here at ActivityPub.Space
We're running NodeBB, which is a federated forum software that interacts with the threadiverse/forumverse natively, but also interacts with microblogs.
Anything coming from microblogs has no community attached, so we throw it all into a single "uncategorized" bucket.
This forum I am posting from is about ActivityPub, so I set up an auto-categorization rule so that posts using #ActivityPub get slotted into general — sounds good, right? Except that tag has a fairly low SNR. Every day I have to remove 4 or 5 posts that are at most tangential to ActivityPub at all.
I ran into similar issues with #climbing for a rock climbing forum. People use #climbing when they climb rocks... but also trees, fences, buildings, etc...
So it can work, it just needs some ongoing curation. Essentially what I am trying to say is... hashtags are fine, but its usage is nowhere near consistent enough to use in a global context like you are saying.
It's a good approach, it's exactly how NodeBB operates as well.
We have a FOSS software and we sell managed services for those who don't have the technical know-how.
Win-win.
Can you not call fetch() to do a HEAD call? Maybe I'm mistaken about it but it should be ok.
CORS is indeed a wrench that gets thrown in when you least expect it...
It took me a minute to find, but it is detailed in evan@cosocial.ca's write up about HTTP Discovery of ActivityPub Objects.
This is probably exactly what you're looking for.
https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-html-discovery/
I think your current approach has merit but is limited. If you know the instance software by URL and can resolve it using path matching without the use of a pre-flight request, that's absolutely a better way forward. The downside is you have to know the URL patterns of every software. You'll never "catch 'em all"!
However, if that method fails, doing a pre-flight check to grab Link also works and is a viable way forward.
You can test against NodeBB users or posts.
Very few things in humanity are completely novel. We're iterative beings by nature.
Lots of businesses (not just decentralized FOSS stuff) is X but Y... just watch any episode of Dragon's Den or Shark Tank...