So this is pretty cool. I'm starting to get Activitypub now. It's really really cool. I've been able to setup a few different selfhosted activitypub servers to experiment with, including tinyblogpub/microblogpub, and also some custom Fedify based activitypub server code.
I've then been able to use those test servers to read/write/generally interact with a few other different fediverse/activitypub things including activitypub.academy, some personal blogs and some Lemmy instances.
I haven't had an active social media account really in a decade or so. I forgot how much more than just tweets it can be. I like the idea of my activitypub server being my home feed for various types of content across the internet. I can see a world where that feed replaces or aggregates my current youtube/reddit/hackernews/blogs content type feeds.
I'm definitely still coming to terms with visibility in the fediverse. There's still a few occasions where I expect to see something from my instance, but because that object originates from a server I don't have a relationship with, then I don't get the latest or most complete info about it.
I could also see how I could follow a bunch of activitypub places from my selfhosted server, and quickly end up overloaded with activitypub traffic.
A couple of other notes from following a lemmy board from microblogpub/tinyblogpub:
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following a board will result in all new posts and comments on that board being forwarded to the following instance.
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currently, it's not easy to consume in the feed, as it shows each comment as a "in response to this object" link, without showing the original post.
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the board is basically a user which shares anything shared with it. Someone might post a new post on their local instance, but mention/share it with the lemmmy board which will then share it with me.
So currently, following a lemmyboard with any amount of activity isn't great, because the feed gets spammed with comments without context, and posts without updated/relevant info. I'll probably try address these with 2 small UI fixes:
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in the feed, show top level posts from a lemmyboard as just the thread title/comment count/like e.g. "full thread title". Show new comments as: "full threa..." comment response from user
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in the feed, try indicate what visibility is expected of an object. e.g maybe yellow border if we're not federated with the instance hosting the source object, indicating that clicking/visiting the origin might get more interesting info.
Also been reading around ATProto, although I'm a little wary of it because I haven't used it to understand it yet. I really like it decentralises other things such as feeds, moderation, relays etc. One struggle I have is that I see people advocating the ATProto over activitypub because indexers essentially serve as load balancers for self hosted PDS which could possibly even be served as static content, whereas selfhosting an activitypub server can be messy if there's a lot of activity. On one hand, I like that the load balancing is built into the architecture of the protocol, on the other hand, are you really self hosting/owning your data if you're dependent on an indexer for it to be accessible? Furthermore, if there's benefit for a public layer of caching infra like indexers for PDS, why couldn't a similar public caching layer for activitypub servers be created to host just the POST parts of a users activitypub profile? I guess that's partially what fed.brid.gy does.