how it feels to talk about #activitypub and how #fedi implements it
the way to maintain an authoritative collection is to send out Add/Remove, not to have everyone send out Create and then expect everyone else to reconstruct the collection for themselves
yknow, actually *maintain* the collection. currently we just punt it off
i can't say i blame developers for taking the lazy route and doing the bare minimum to be compatible with what already exists, but that is so limiting and i'm not here for it
the bigger problem is that there's so many assumptions being made with zero basis or foundation in anything. we're just replicating stuff around and then every server assembles it however it *thinks* it should be put together.
we're getting to the point that the contradictions and shortcomings are starting to become more apparent...
- things like moderated conversations are impossible if you don't actually have a concept of a "conversation".
- there's so many different ways to do "groups" that it's a running joke at this point, because everyone has a different idea of what a "group" is. it's the "blind men feeling an elephant" problem.
- things like forums and subforums, chat rooms, etc are not easily possible rn.
Those goals might be at odds with a distributed system, though.
With the shortcomings inherent to federation, it's hard to say for sure that such conversations are particularly possible.
So we have people trying to shoehorn functionality that's not right for the tools, and it's not working so well. Perhaps they simply shouldn't.
