So, I think there are two important things people in the Fediverse movement can do to help with these possible outcomes.
The first is to keep building on ActivityPub. I love our protocol and our ecosystem, and I think it's a wonderful network. But it's also a necessary hedge against clawback or collapse.
@tom @julian @astro There are some small differences in following between a relay and a regular actor. But it's essentially correct.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ae0c/fep-ae0c.md
This all brings in a firehose, which can be a lot of data to handle, especially if you're only interested in a few topics.
Fedibuzz has solved this really nicely, by having one relay per hashtag. So an admin can add a few hashtag relays for topics of interest to their users.
@julian We apparently agree that expecting us to follow bot accounts to see hashtags is absurd. But that's how it looks to me.
Are you saying that this is under the hood stuff and we are not expected to follow bot accounts? That somehow these accounts will transparently deliver the hashtags we follow? If so, it's a huge mistake to notify users that an instantly created bot account has boosted a post.
And again, I think the bigger problem is hashtag abuse. I hope someone is working on that.
@julian @mlanger I don't actually think it's an ugly hack.
In ActivityPub world, things that you follow remotely are actors. They can be people, groups, organizations, bots, even other things like documents or places.
For following a hashtag remotely, I think it should look like any other actor on the network.
I think if there's one thing I'd say to #ActivityPub developers, it's this: it seems like it's going to be easier to just parse Activity Streams 2.0 data as plain JSON, but it's not. You have to keep track of too many variations. Use a JSON-LD library instead. For JavaScript, try activitystrea.ms:
@trwnh "more actively maintained"?
The code is long-term but it was built by one author of AS2 and maintained by the other. It works well, and I use it in production systems all the time.
I'm pretty sure @hongminhee has made a similar package, although I'm not sure it's distributed independently.
@evan@cosocial.ca @trwnh@mastodon.social I’m maintaining the @fedify/vocab package which depends on the jsonld package from Digital Bazaar. It’s written in 100% TypeScript, and has worked well on production services!
@giantspecks @mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto Hi John! I agree, you should be able to follow hashtags globally across the Fediverse. That's why we're making tags.pub.
@brooke oh, great. Let me know if you ever need any favours. I also won't be in a rush.
@dineinfr thanks, I'll check!
@julian OK, I'll take a look!
@julian awesome!