Automatic Blurb Extraction
Meaning that a link post automatically extracts some meta info - every time it's clicked, not only when it's created. Because it appears that Lemmy doesn't automatically do it once at posting time.
Examples:
https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2446966/la-la-land
https://piefed.zip/c/[email protected]/p/1874208/we-noticed-that-you-are-blocking-our-ads
I only see a link. When I view the original post on a Lemmy-based instance, I see an automatically, real-time extracted blurb.
Is pyfedi's stance something like "it should be enough to do that once when you create the post"? But apparently that's not common practice?
3 replies
Is PieFed trying to pull in data on post creation? I think what people do is just post links and the platform can then go ahead and fetch a social media post and display it alongside, or fetch something like the Open Graph metadata of a news article and display the summary...
I haven't looked at the code. Seems Lemmy fetches Mastodon toots. I remember this being discussed in the history of the Fediverse. Our instances already do lots of HTTP requests all day, so we should make it somewhat efficient. Idk if doing additional requests on each view would be great. On the other hand fetching it immediately on post creation isn't great either, because we end up in a situation where we constantly DDoS websites because each time anyone posts a link, that website is going to be bombarded by requests by hundreds or thousands of Fedi servers... Idk where we're at with that discussion... mainly remember this wasn't as straightforward as it seems.
Would be useful to have those "blurbs" though. Both for cross-posts and other stuff.
It has happened sometimes on e.g. music communities. Possibly only with Youtube links.
I understand all objections, but the UX just sucks for some users if all clients don't have a common way to deal with such things.
Are there, btw, consortiums or some such to discuss specs and policy like in this example, fediverse-wide?
Good question. I think some more general and active communities to discuss our part of the Fediverse are ![email protected] and ![email protected]
We also got ![email protected] to discuss apps. And ![email protected] for PieFed apps in specific. I'm not really into phone app development, so I wouldn't know where they mingle.
Then we have ![email protected] from the NodeBB people. They have a sister community for technical discussion as well.
And activitypub.rocks and their forum at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ which contains a lot of protocol discussions / drafts etc.
I occasionally see high profile names pop up somewhere in those communities. Some of the devs don't comment all that much but I'm sometimes surprised they read stuff in random corners of the Fediverse. Not sure if we have a way to talk to Mastodon people. Seems to me we're living in different bubbles. And they don't have communities on their platform anyway. They do have hashtags, though.
For discussing PieFed, you're in the right place.
And sure, I get this sucks. And we've successfully tackled other non-straightforward issues before. Usually it's a good idea to just ask for your platform and apps, maybe send in a feature request on their Codeberg or GitHub. It's a bit hard to move past that because all the projects have different agendas, maybe a long backlog. And a lot of the stuff here just emerges from other platforms doing nice stuff. Someone will pioneer and then other people implement it as well. We got specifications as well, but I'm a bit unsure if your concern is about the protocol. I don't think so, but I don't have a clue.