evan@evan@activitypub.space

Federating servers

So, one part of the popular imagination about ActivityPub I've seen is the idea of server federation.

I think the idea is that if two servers have interacted in some way, all (?) public (?) content from one server will be sent to the other server, and vice versa.

This comes up a lot with new servers; people ask to have a post shared broadly so that their server rubs shoulders with others, getting the federated feed flow going.

ActivityPub does in fact have a mechanism defined for this:

Additionally, if an object is addressed to the Public special collection, a server MAY deliver that object to all known sharedInbox endpoints on the network.

As far as I've seen, most (?) servers don't implement this; it would overwhelm small servers pretty quickly.

However, some (?) servers do implement it for some (?) activities, especially profile update and delete activities.

Is this the origin of the idea that new servers need to have their content shared around? Are people misunderstanding the way that relays work? Is it just a trick to get your content shared?

Mike Macgirvin@mike@macgirvin.com

Replying to an earlier post

In the streams repository a few years back, we implemented a mechanism where "site actors" could follow each other, and this would result in sharing local public content with selected other sites, regardless of personal connections between actors. This scales so you can build small or large "clusters" or cooperating servers. The keyword being that this is server sharing which is "consent" based.

There was little or no interest in this ability from anybody, so the feature languished. I think it's still implemented, but there's no motivation to pursue it  further. I'll just mention it if somebody else feels like dying on hills today.
:blank:@i@declin.eu

Replying to @⁨julian@activitypub.space⁩

@julian @technical-discussion @evan pleroma ships a /relay actor turned on by default that follows back other relays, this server subscribes to a thousand or so of them, announces get turned into remotefetches for efficiency, and the network is filled effortlessly without follow for follow botting

wish the network had some sort of shared as:public /outbox too for backfill