@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.
@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.