That sounds a lot like a weird spin on the Slashdot effect, caused by content mirroring. It seems that it could be handled by tweaking the ActivityPub protocol to have one instance requesting to generate a link preview, and the other instances copying the link preview instead of sending their own requests.
But frankly? I think that the current way that ActivityPub works is outright silly. Here’s what it does currently:
User is registered to instance A
Since A federates with B, A mirrors content from B into A
The backend is either specific to instance A (the site) or configured to use instance A (for a phone program)
When the user interacts with content from B, actually it’s the mirrored version of content from B that is hosted in A
In my opinion a better approach would be:
User is registered to instance A
Since A federates with B, B accepts login credentials from A
The backend is instance-agnostic, so it’s able to pull/send content from/to multiple instances at the same time
When the user interacts with content from B, the backend retrieves content from B, and uses the user’s A credentials to send content to B
Note that the second way would not create this “automated Slashdot effect” - only A would be pulling info from the site, and then users (regardless of their instance) would pull it from A.
Now, here’s my question: why does the ActivityPub work like in that first way, instead of this second one?
I’m aware of Nostr. In my opinion it splits better back- and front-end tasks than the AP does, even if the later does some things better (as the balance between safeness and censorship-resistance). It’s still an interesting counterpoint to ActivityPub.
That sounds a lot like a weird spin on the Slashdot effect, caused by content mirroring. It seems that it could be handled by tweaking the ActivityPub protocol to have one instance requesting to generate a link preview, and the other instances copying the link preview instead of sending their own requests.
But frankly? I think that the current way that ActivityPub works is outright silly. Here’s what it does currently:
In my opinion a better approach would be:
Note that the second way would not create this “automated Slashdot effect” - only A would be pulling info from the site, and then users (regardless of their instance) would pull it from A.
Now, here’s my question: why does the ActivityPub work like in that first way, instead of this second one?
Check out Nostr, ActivityPub alternative that does authentication separately from content, works more like that.
I’m aware of Nostr. In my opinion it splits better back- and front-end tasks than the AP does, even if the later does some things better (as the balance between safeness and censorship-resistance). It’s still an interesting counterpoint to ActivityPub.