Fediverse Discovery Providers overview

Presentation delivered at Fediforum September 20204

Learn more at https://fediscovery.org

Transcript

1. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Fediverse Discovery Providers discovery for the social web
2. fediscovery.org #fediscovery The Fediverse is rich, awesome, full of great people & content (we know this, we’re at Fediforum)
3. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Problem statement • Fediverse services communicate via ActivityPub, but are largely independent for (content) search and discovery. • Small and medium instances especially may not easily find topics and content of interest.
4. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Federation
5. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Default (per-instance) search
6. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Search Provider Alternative Search Provider Discovery via optional providers
7. fediscovery.org #fediscovery • optional, pluggable • none, one, many • independent of instance type • respect user choice & privacy
8. fediscovery.org #fediscovery NGI Search The project was initiated by the Mastodon team, via a grant from NGI Search, under their themes: • Search and Discovery Features for Existing Digital Common Projects • Privacy Preserving Technologies in Search and Discovery
9. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Privacy • FEP-5feb defines actor-level aribute to express consent (or lack thereof) to public objects being indexed for search. • Instances must only send indexable data to Discovery Providers. • Instances must only send anonymised data around e.g. boosts or trends. • Open to feedback, more in the proposal.
10. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Specifications • Definition of a “Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider” (& how to add one to a Fediverse server). • S2S protocols between instances and discovery providers (how to send content to a provider for indexing; how to query and find content in a provider).
11. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Reference Implementation • We will build a discovery provider (as a minimum, to prove the concept). • Anyone can build their own, with their own preferred tech stack.
12. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Current Status • Project is funded & announced. • We are listening to feedback. 1 ! define “Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider” 2 ! define Discovery Provider (^^ one of these) 3 ! build a reference implementation
13. fediscovery.org #fediscovery Questions & Next Steps • Some questions covered in site FAQ, more coming in already… e.g. Q: “is it the same as a relay?” A: TBD; not created with intent to replace the relay concept, but, in the same space. • We will share proposed definitions for Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers. • We do not have answers to everything today; WIP!
14. fediscovery.org #fediscovery hps://fediscovery.org hps://github.com/mastodon/fediverse_discovery_providers (for now) follow @MastodonEngineering@mastodon.social