@technology Is there a Usenet like app/website/whatever of the Fediverse?
So, I’ve sort of grown up in the Usenet, and this whole Federation thing sort of feels very reminiscent of it. To the point where I’m wondering why there isn’t a way to access it in this fashion? Any tips would be very helpful. I love the idea of this thing and would probably even begin running my own server if that becomes viable.
A quick skim of the protocol documents suggests you’re right: Activity Vocabulary doesn’t even mention the “discovery” use case, and no allowance seems to have been made for it. I can’t fathom what they were thinking.
The short-term workaround would be scraping the Web portal “Communities > Local” page of each instance periodically for a list (and cache the info centrally? Not sure.) Hopefully the raw HTML is parsable enough that you wouldn’t have to involve Selenium (which I’ve used in my day job—it’s awful) or its ilk.
The correct fix is, of course, to add the “discovery” case and messages supporting it to the protocol, either as an extension or as core for the next version. This might take years.
It might be worth asking browse.feddit.de how they get their information.