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gab-ai-inc / gab-dissenter-extension

Dissenter.com Browser Extension source code
https://dissenter.com
Apache License 2.0
272 stars 43 forks source link

Add ActivityPub support #85

Open mister-monster opened 5 years ago

mister-monster commented 5 years ago

This might be a big project but would anyone have interest in implementing ActivityPub federation in this project? Since the code is open source, people can run their own servers already, I think it would be great to be able to federate multiple servers to better protect against censorship. Thoughts?

MasterOfTheTiger commented 5 years ago

@mister-monster This is the dissenter extension. I am not sure how you would add any federation to it. Can you elaborate?

mkljczk commented 5 years ago

It's possible, but could comments be announced to other dissenter servers?

mister-monster commented 5 years ago

From what i understand, dissenter functions sort of like a link aggregator but from a user perspective it is just a secondary comments section for any URL. The comments are stored on a server. Since the code is open source, anyone can run their own version of dissenter but their servers can't talk to each other. Adding federation would enable that, and also add a good bit of censorship resistance since no country or ISP can block "the" server.

mister-monster commented 5 years ago

It's possible, but could comments be announced to other dissenter servers?

I did some thought on this and it does seem to be an obstacle. I have an account on instance A, i comment on some URL, another user from instance B visits the same URL. How does their browser extension know that a comment exists for that URL on instance A?

The trick to federating is some feasible way to query the federation for all comments. I am not too familiar with the Mastodon code base, but since it is already in use for the Gab social network, could the search functionality that it uses be taken and used to solve this issue?