@evilviper I’ve actually gone ahead and begun work despite lack of discovery. https://github.com/JustusW/UnifiedFediverseObserver
Early stages, but I already can go through linked relations in many cases.

@russmatney thanks for that one! I did look into how other clients are doing stuff quite a bit. The one you mentioned simply takes a valid endpoint (ie a lemmy community AcitivityPub-id, meaning the URL to it). The issue I’m facing is finding those endpoints. In theory you’d want to be able to find valid endpoints for an instance somehow, which I just can’t seem to do.

@Hexorg can’t directly reply to your comment because that wasn’t federated (oh the sweet irony) :D
Anyway, it’s more like I’m trying to write a usenet reader, fully expecting to have to create a curated list of of instances but then finding out there is no way to see what any given instance actually contains outside of writing specific code for each and every one of them.

@Hexorg I’ve begun yesterday with the question “why can’t I access information without first having to know where it is?” I’ve now basically gone through confusion, anger, disbelieve and now acceptance that there really is nothing to find. In the end the concept of federation says that stuff should be accessible from anywhere. But it isn’t. Which is a pretty big problem imo.
My goal is to indeed create a generic fediverse reader, not using any specific platform APIs.

@admin “all” is a pretty tall order, but I have been reading both the lemmy, mastodon, activitypub and several other documentations to get a feel for dataflow and presentation. I’m sort of baffled by this shortfall. The expectation for something “implementing ActivityPub” would be that I can access the target instance to a usable degree with it. Right now that is definitely not the case. There is no way to get a list of communities, so with only “beehaw.org” known I have no way to find anything.

@nyan so it’s not only me missing the elephant in the room. O_o
That’s a pretty huge gap. Which has severe consequences all the way down the pipe…
There’s a current issue with lemmy with comments not being synchronized properly. Possibly a direct consequence of the entire system replication being push with no backup pull or reconciliation in the protocol.
I’m looking into a couple directions right now, but this is completely breaking the foundational promise of the very concept of fediverse…

@nyan couple of hours of research in and I’m baffled. There is no apparent mechanism for discovery in ActivityPub.
It appears as if the protocol has simply ignored the literal first step of all social interaction: Observation.
Take lemmy as an example, if I visit beehaw.org directly I can click on “Communities” and get a list of them. Yet, there is no way I could identify to get this via ActivityPub. I’m completely and utterly baffled.

@nyan @leopardboy that. Although even accessing federated content on demand would work. There’s no technical reason to limit what you display to the user to one instance. If I want to access lemmy.cafe from mastodon.social why is that not possible? It’s federated, so I should be able to do that. The API definitely allows it, as seen in this thread. The User Interface just doesn’t deal with it. I understand the limitations at play quite well, which is why I’m thinking dedicated client.

@leopardboy not as such. I just want a way to access the entire fediverse from one tool, warts and all. I assume such a thing doesn’t exist. Yet. A state I will probably begin working on momentarily.

@leopardboy I’m coming from the PoV of accessing it. Every fediverse compatible instance is just another store of messages. Technically I have part of this, I’m writing this very reply on mastodon.social, but I can’t explore beehaw.org unless I leave mastodon.social and go there. Basically it would mean treating the instance you work from as just an email account while showing compatible content from any source and allowing you to interact with it as is.