Bookwyrm.social reviews not showing(or showing partly) on another instances

[tali-vitali]

Describe the bug Bookwyrm.social reviews not showing(or showing partly) on another instances.

To Reproduce Example 1: "Fairy Tail" by Stephen King https://bookwyrm.social/book/429411/s/fairy-tale (12 reviews) https://orreadi.com/book/14739/s/fairy-tale (3 reviews) https://buecher.pnpde.social/book/5051/s/fairy-tale (2 reviews) https://bookrastinating.com/book/91108/s/fairy-tale (6 reviews)

Example 2: "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" by Suzanne Collins https://bookwyrm.social/book/107589/s/the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes (18 reviews) https://orreadi.com/book/32174/s/the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes (1 review) https://buecher.pnpde.social/book/7399/s/the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes (1 review) https://bookrastinating.com/book/41409/s/the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes (6 reviews)

Expected behavior Same reviews for all instances in each example.

Instance Orreadi(0.6.0 bookwyrm version), pnpde.social Bücherwurm(ver 0.6.1), bookrastinating.com(ver 0.5.3)

[WesleyAC]

I think this is largely expected behaviour, given how ActivityPub works. Reviews are only federated to instances when someone on that instance follows the person who published the review. This is similar to how things work in other ActivityPub projects — on Mastodon, for instance, posts are only federated where there's a follow relationship.

There are ways to improve this — for instance, we could add support for ActiivtyPub relays — but on the whole, this can be a touchy subject, and it's one that there's been a lot of discussion about and various solutions proposed in the broader ActivityPub ecosystem.

[tali-vitali]

@WesleyAC, I think maximum number of reviews very important in all instances for project like bookwyrm(mb unlike other fediverse projects), at least for book views(e.g. https://bookwyrm.social/book/429411/s/fairy-tale). Important for discovering what to read next.

Feed is good(and should be) without reviews from other instances - understandable.

Otherwise why new common reader(not researcher, not native of other language than english) will choose another instances with less users and correspondingly less reviews. And then use chosen site for social activity and both chosen and bookwyrm.social for discovering what to read.

[WesleyAC]

I agree that this is a problem for users that is worth improving. I wanted to be clear that I don't expect to ever have 100% coverage, and I don't think that should be the goal, but making it easier for instances, especially small instances to share reviews seems good.

In terms of practical solutions, enabling the use of relays for this seems like the most impactful thing, so I'll open a issue for that, but I'm happy to hear other suggestions as well.

[WesleyAC]

Created #2802 for discussion of relays specifically as a solution to this problem.

[WesleyAC]

2005 is also relevant to this problem

[LokiMidgard]

There could also be an option to temporarily load and list reviews from other instances. Similar to search, where you can search other catalogs and it will sometimes list dozens of wyrmbook instances.