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Specifications for Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers
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Discovery basics: Data Sharing #36

Open oneiros opened 1 week ago

oneiros commented 1 week ago

This is the first step of defining discovery providers (see https://www.fediscovery.org).

The first specification revolves around "data sharing". This is the foundation of any search and discovery related functionality. FASP need to be able to learn of new (and also existing) content and then fetch it to be able to index it.

"data sharing" as a title is still just a preliminary proposal. We used to call this "content ingestion", but the way this should work, is that instances only share URLs with FASP. A FASP is then responsible for how to act on this information. And while we included some hints on how to fetch the data properly, the core of the specification is the interaction between FASP and fediverse software. And that is not about "ingestion". Also, since we also deal with user account data, "content" might not be a perfect term here. So we arrived at "data sharing". I would be happy if anyone had a better idea, but for now I think this should work.

Note that I post this now to get early feedback, but I will also start working on an implementation. And I might still make some adjustments when I learn that some things do not work out in practice.

ThisIsMissEm commented 1 week ago

I haven't reviewed the full proposal yet, but based on your description above, it may make sense to share not just URLs, but also types, hashtags and account URLs, as those are the most common things to aggregate by.