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jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
I'm not sure how things have changed in practice since I last took a deeper look, but in theory this is inevitable - you use an appview. As far as ive seen in appviews, you have no control over what relays your appview listens to. There can be 100 relays but it doesn't matter if your appview doesn't listen to them. The system only works if relays are assumed to be "whole network" views - without that, you need to make sure that your PDS is crawled by, and your appview listens to the right set of relays. With incomplete relays, whether you can see or be seen by anyone else on the network becomes a worse combinatoric picture than fedi instances.
This problem is showing up when there are only a handful of relays and a handful of (widely used, microblogging) appviews. What does that start to look like when there are hundreds of either?
I am aware that this is not totally fundamental to all interpretations and implementations of the protocol, and that some services do direct PDS->AppView connections, but it is how the "big world" works - correct me if this has changed