@erin usually fedi instances will publish an RSS feed of one's public posts, so using that with a feed reader is a workaround. There are some fedi instances that do a moral equivalent of that (they don't use an RSS feed, but monitor the activitystreams feed). In one patched Mastodon version the functionality is called "subscription".
@erin I don't see why small instances should behave in a way that's significantly different here, but might be missing something.
They are somewhat controversial, because they allow me to subscribe to accounts that either have blocked me, or whose instance blocked mine.
@robryk if - and that is a significant if - my understanding of activitypub federation is correct, your small instance may not be getting all of someone’s public activity if no one on it actually follows that someone.
@erin the idea here is that your instance will also function as a glorified ~RSS reader, so it polls the feeds that users are subscribing to.
@robryk I’m just having the exact same conversation with someone on irc and my conclusion so far is:
it would maybe kinda sorta work only as a source of information on what to request over the activitypub protocol. in other words, if the source server does not federate content to you, you could use rss to request it explicitly.
I see all kinds of nasty impedance mismatch scenarios in any software trying to really be a hybrid fedi/rss reader by pulling data from two distinct sources like this, then presenting it to the user in a way that pretends it’s the same thing.
no actual research on the latter, just a gut feeling of a former systems engineer who was often put in charge of integrating software stacks that were never intended and designed to be integrated. I can smell that shit already just from the description and I do not like it.
@erin it's not pulling from RSS, but rather from the activitystreams feed. (I only mentioned RSS, because that's the option that's easier to kludge together if your instance doesn't do that.)
@robryk oh, ok. thank you for the input and clarification.
I have to make myself a bit more familiar with the protocol side of this.
@erin try requesting urls of various things with Accept: application/ld+json to see how things look like in practice. The correct RFC to start reading is the activitystreams one while breathing in mind that the client to server pretty of it is very rarely implemented (so one can rely on server to server ~only).
@robryk do they do it in a way that works well with single-user/small instances “subscribing”? I’ll have to look it up.