#social 2023-06-15

2023-06-15 UTC
Loqi_, tantek and Justus joined the channel
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Justus Hi there, I'm trying to wrap my head around the way to access data from a read only, explorative client. Is it correct that for pure reading any content via AP I don't need an account anywhere?
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tantek depends on the server
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Justus well, let's take mastodon and lemmy as examples, both of those have mostly public outboxes, yes?
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tantek sure, with such specific implementations you can even fallback to reading the OG "outbox" API of their RSS feeds, simpler than AP
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Justus I'm truly wondering why I can't find a Usenet type reader for all of this
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tantek great question
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Justus it would simplify so much
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Justus I am _so_ starting on this today
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tantek I think the big question is the point you made about "read only, explorative client" — for such "public only" use-cases, existing feeds, RSS / Atom / h-feed are a *much* simpler way to build a "reader for all of this"
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Justus well, I originally changed to mastodon during the twitter apocalypse and I now ocasionally use it
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tantek the key question is showing private/protected/friends-only content, in which case it's better to dive fully into supporting AP / specific authenticated APIs for servers
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Justus now with the reddit apocalypse I looked at lemmy, and obviously I could post to lemmy instances using my mastodon account
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Justus but I can't seamlessly explore either, despite the fact that both have clean protocol based unauthenticated access
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Justus gonna have to mull this one over a bit I think, but there is something there.
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tantek definitely. micro.blog is another good example here, and supports the W3C standard Micropub for client-server posting (as do many other servers / software)
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