this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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ActivityPub is all about pushing content around to subscribing servers. It sort of expects the subscribers to always be online which would not work for a phone. Servers could resend missed events, but essentially you would miss every event that occurs while the phone is asleep or doesn’t have the app running.
Also, every event that occurs needs to be processed and stored whether or not you are actively looking at it so it would be a huge battery drain while it was running.
It is definitely a service best run on an always-on server with a client application in a phone just asking the server for the latest stuff on-demand.
Events could be cached on the p2p network, so the phone only pings its peers for new content (mind the existing servers would be peers on the network).
Then the p2p network is really the “server” and the phone is still just a client. I’m also not sure that a p2p network could be queried very well because something would have to be able to produce aggregated and sorted results. It isn’t like pulling one file from a swarm. It would be like a blockchain and the phone would have to download the whole dataset from the p2p network before running queries on it.
What you are talking about sounds kind of like the Nostr protocol. It is a distributed social network trying to solve the same problem that ActivityPub is but in a slightly different way. All the events are cached on multiple relays and the client applications query those relays looking for information that gets aggregated and sorted on the client however it wants.
Yes, the proposal is something like Nostr, but the clients can also relay data on request if they're online. A little more decentralized.
Worth mentioning that the idea is not to make Lemmy abandon ActivityPub, but to allow further decentralisation.
There wouldn't be a need to keep all data like a blockchain to query all data since most sort by hot/recent. Something like Gossipsub would suffice for most users.
But whenever an user queries for old or specific data, the request could be directed to a relay that archives and sorts all data.