In the most practical cases, yes. But in theory, there is nothing about the protocol that says that message addressing implies message visibility, or even access control.

Also, be careful of taking your assumptions and treating them as universal truths. One day somebody could build an IRC-like system on ActivityPub and decides to treat a “ChatMessage” object as public objects which may or may not be addressed at a single participant. There would be no “bug” if the server picks up the object, relays to others, or even indexes it and makes it searchable.

I wasn’t talking about the specifics of Lemmy, but ActivityPub in general. You can not guarantee that just because a message has been addressed to a single actor that only that actor will see it.

Yes, but if you want a real one-to-one, private chat system use Matrix or XMPP. Treat anything you write on Lemmy as public information.

The fact that a message is addressed to a single person does not mean that it’s only sent to that person. In theory, anyone following you will receive a notification about the message.

This is how federation was sold to me

But did you pay anything for it?

“it works when everyone behaves well” is not the same as being protected.

It doesn’t even take a malicious actor: I am working on a local-first browser extension that is very aggressive about caching content in the database. There is no “please delete this data” for an extension. You of all people should not be making claims about privacy that you know you can not guarantee.

Asking to delete data that you published on the public internet is the same as asking for water to be not wet.

Don’t fall for the illusion of privacy that the proprietary networks give you: there are people that copy data from reddit just for the fun of it. Always assume that anything you publish online is publicly available.

Please use a test instance…

they seem to want this service to stay free and open

TANSTAAFL.

The admin might think they are being this generosity is good for the users, but at the end of the day all it just gets them burned out and gives people who signed up the impression that all matrix servers are slow. Meanwhile, acess to my matrix server is not free, ($29/year, less than $2.50/month) but by charning just a little bit I can make sure that it grows at a rate that I can manage and doesn’t make my infrastructure implode.

There is a super easy way to solve this: make registration available only for users that contribute.

Cara, eu já estou com com uns 70% da API do Lemmy implementada, e passei esse fim de semana todo trabalhando numa entensão pro browser que “puxa” o grafo social localmente e mostra os dados, como se fosse um browser. Quero ver se consigo fazer posts via C2S antes de ir dormir. :)

Tudo isso pra dizer: sim, eu tenho muito pitaco pra dar nessa história…

He likes the process of working on greenfield ideas and gets bored once he ships the MVP, which is fine. What is not fine is that he makes a ton of hype around new projects, but after he gets tired of playing with it, he refuses to let go. It sucks the air out of the community for very little benefit.

I was hoping that the PixelFed kickstarter would force him to finally focus on the damn thing, but it seems he simply does not have the drive or interest to work at a steady pace in one single product.

I was excited about this. Went on to look at the website and was greeted with a “Coming Soon!” message. It all made sense when I saw it was yet-another project from Daniel “Overpromise and Underdeliver” Supernault.

If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.

Once you achieve any kind of scale, whoever your client is querying to get the book data for those kinds of queries is going to block you

You know that the whole of wikidata can be copied with just a few hundreds of GBs, right? There are plenty of examples of community-driven data providers (especially in the *arr space), so I can bet that there would be more people setting up RDF data servers (which is mostly read-heavy, public data sharing) than people willing to set up their Mastodon/Lemmy/GoToSocial server - because that involves replicating data from everyone else, dealing with network partitions, etc…

Also, there are countless ways to make this less dependent on any big server, the client could pull specific subsets of the data and cache data locally so the more they are used the less they would need to fetch remote resources.

Think of it like this: a client-first application that understands linked data would be no different than a traditional web browser, but the main difference is that the client would only use json-ld and not HTML.

Or are all of the books objects stored on activitypub and I get the data from the social graph itself?

Not “stored on activitypub”, but each book could be represented with RDF (it could be something as sophisticated as using DublinCore or as simple as just using isbns to uniquely identity the books (urn:isbn:1234556789) , and then each activity for “CombatWombatEsq read a book” would be an activity where you are the actor and the book is the object. Then it would be up to the client to expand that information. Your client app could take the ISBN and query wikidata, or Amazon, or nothing at all…

and building an “everything server” that implements every message you might want to send is prohibitive just in terms of complexity and scope.

It is not. A server that “speaks” the ActivityPub is not that difficult to build, I’ve done it. The complexity is in getting the data from the social graph into and creating a good UX for users who are too used with the “app-centric” mentality.

All the “features missing on Lemmy” could/should be implemented on the client. The fact that developers don’t understand that and go on to reimplement a whole part of the stack (instead of joining forces and helping the existing effort) is counterproductive.

It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases

That is not fully correct. The index the data from the different personal data servers, and they host the largest personal data server out there, but you can have your own PDS and interact with other Bluesky users without having to rely on their data.

This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs.

Yeah, but why? ActivityPub already provides the “data model” and the API. Internal storage is an implementation detail. Why do we continue to accept this idea that each different mode of interaction with the social graph requires an entirely separate server?

Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features

Like OP said, on bluesky is possible to have different “shells” that interact with the network. Why wouldn’t that be possible on ActivityPub?

Unfortunately, no. Mastodon makes no distinction between posts and comments (it is all a Note), so there is no way for a Lemmy server to notify a mastodon server only for posts.