Two Approaches to Solving the "Quiet Fediverse" Problem: Conversation Backfilling Mechanisms
This post addresses the "quiet fediverse" problem, where users often experience fragmented conversations on decentralized social networks. The core issue stems from ActivityPub's distributed nature, where conversations are spread across multiple servers, leading to incomplete views of discussions. The author explores two main approaches to solve this: reply tree crawling and the context owner approach. Reply tree crawling, pioneered by Mastodon, involves fetching all replies to reconstruct the conversation, while the context owner approach centralizes conversation management with the original author or designated entity.
The post details the technical mechanisms, advantages, and disadvantages of each method, highlighting the importance of the `context` attribute in ActivityPub. It also discusses ongoing debates, such as moderation paradigms and solutions for missing parent propagation, and introduces additional backfill mechanisms like periodic crawling and mention-based discovery. The article emphasizes the need for hybrid approaches, combining multiple strategies to ensure more complete conversations, and underscores the importance of standardization efforts and collaboration among different implementations. Ultimately, the post provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and potential solutions for creating a more connected and coherent user experience in the fediverse.
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