• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 20th, 2024

help-circle



  • After the point in time where you made the connection, you will see activity start coming in from their connections. So you should gradually see their followers populate as those people make new posts, which get federated to your instance through your connection to them.

    Especially if the connection you made is the first time the remote instance has been interacted with, it’s going to look barren at first because there is basically no capability to sync history. You can think of it like an RSS feed.

    (This is oversimplified - it’s possible that ActivityPub might allow for historical items to be synced just like RSS publishers can choose to include older data. I would speculate that it’s not commonly done for bandwidth reasons if it is possible.)

    A downside to this is that if you’re trying to read through historical posts (from before you made the connection) you will have to click through to the hosting instance to get a complete view.

    An upside to this is that because you only see content posted after the connection is established, you are guaranteed to be seeing new posts from active users.










  • They’re pretty reasonable for consensus-based programming prompts as well like “Compare and contrast popular libraries for {use case} in {language}” or “I want to achieve {goal/feature} in {summary of project technologies}, what are some ways I could structure this?”

    Of course you still shouldn’t treat any of the output as factual without verifying it. But at least in the former case, I’ve found it more useful than traditional search engines to generate leads to look into, even if I discard some or all of the specific information it asserts

    Edit: Which is largely due to traditional search engines getting worse and worse in recent years, sadly




  • What are some of the popular Matrix clients that you’ve seen have this problem? And are they open source?

    I’ve been curious about Matrix for a while as a potential Discord replacement, but haven’t actually tried it. Might be interesting to check it out and see whether I can contribute to one of the clients somehow.