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.

Social Engineering for Good. Social Engineering for Progress.

AFAIK, “community migration” is done in PieFed by having the target instance making a request to the source one to change, and if the owner authorizes it then it PieFed recreates the actor and its objects on the target instance. Then it is up to the owner of the source community to delete close the source community.

My objection is to this recreation of the objects. If someone creates a post on “community@alpha” and the moderator decides to move to “community@beta”, history is being recreated and it makes “beta” with activity that is not original. Also, having the consent from the community owner is not enough, because it ignores the fact that the members of the alpha community might not be interested in being associated with beta.

I still don’t understand how this is not akin to falsifying data. If we normalize servers copying data from other instances and just rewriting the URL, there is little in the way for malicious actors to create piefed instances to scam others pretending to be someone they are not.

lemmy-federate is the wrong solution to this problem. It duplicates data on all instances, even those with no subscribers. it increases the load and the amount of storage requirements for small instances

What we need is a system where admins can set up a separate discovery service, and include that in search results. Mastodon is finally doing something in this direction, and Lemmy/PieFed/mbin would benefit a lot to adopt it.

I’ve added the “without any justification or discussion about the merit of issue at hand” as a qualifier…

It’s totally fine if you say “yes, this looks cool but I don’t have the time to do it”, or even “I’m not so sure about it, but if you bring a PR we can take a better look at it”.

Unless you are on a frantic hurry to make this change, I might be able to help. You’ll need to migrate to Wagtail, and I have done some work on integration with Wagtail and the Fediverse via the Django ActivityPub Toolkit. But if you do consider this, you’d have to keep in mind that the ActivityPub side of things would be a ongoing experiment.

projects like Garage allow to do so in a distributed way.

Really? Does this mean that different instances could share a bucket? Do they have to trust each other? I’ll have to jump off the minio train anyway, if you have any tips to get this going would be nice.

you are in control of which social media you use

I don’t use or support Bluesky.

You are currently spending your energy defending a company

I’m not defending anyone. I am just looking at a stated claim (Bluesky is as bad as Twitter because they verified ICE) and evaluating if it has merits. I don’t think it does.

If a newspaper you enjoy reading

The “newspaper I enjoy reading” is the WWW. The reason that I don’t buy newspapers is because I want to keep the power to curate the information that I receive. As long as I am reasonably in control of the information that I can access, I see no point in complaining about it.

If you want to make a parallel to Reddit: despite it being 99% filled with crap that I don’t care about, I could use it just fine and ignore all the drama. But when they decided to change the terms of the API and they were trying to force the specific channel to use to access it, then I immediately “stopped enjoying it” and went on to work on a solution to be back in control.

So, you would be OK with a newspaper accepting ads

What I am “OK with” has no impact whatsoever in “what actually gets to happen”. I rather not waste my energy on the things that I can not control.

Banning ICE would not let them post Nazi propaganda

It would. They would just do it from unverified accounts. Worse still, they would be able to post it and completely deny it if confronted about it.

the corporate overlords of bluesky will let them post propaganda for free.

Spammers also get to send millions of messages every day for “free”, but we mostly ignore it because we are able to filter them out. Sure, it would be great to completely get rid of spam and the phishing industry… but there is no way to completely get rid of them that does not involve increasing the surveillance aparattus and given more power to a centralized enforcer, so if I have to choose between spammers and corporate-controlled communicatioins, I will take the spammers any day.

I don’t know how else to say it: you keep falling into the same non-sequitur.

No, I don’t expect them to ban anyone from the government. And, no, I don’t think it would be wise to do it: verifying the account does not mean they are supporting it, it just means they are making sure that whatever crap ICE is saying can not go around without accountability.

If you don’t want to see their shitty posts, now you can simply filter it out. And thanks to verification, you can share your filters to others. That’s how decentralized systems work. Bluesky does not control who I get to see. ICE or any other institution can not buy its way into manufacturing propaganda. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than any of the existing alternatives.

but one implies that the other will not be done.

This is false.

Labeling the account as verified and excluding/not excluding from the AppView are two separate actions.

It’s a good thing they get verified. It means they can not take back anything they post and they have to take accountability for the account.

Do you think it would be better if they didn’t verify it and let them spread misinformation and propaganda with plausible deniability?