Contributors to this thread:

it would be nice to have a way to federate users around topics or areas of interest, without having to join a specific server. it would make it easier for people to discover each other based on interests, regardless of the server they join. federated interests...?

#activitypub #musing

@toddsundsted Do you know if there's a way to propagate tags? If not, I wonder if a tag relay would work for that.

@jgaskins so that you could search for tagged content across multiple sites? or something else? tags are propagated as fields in objects, but i suspect that's not what you're thinking of... (what i'd love is some federated way to follow a tag...)

@toddsundsted

> some federated way to follow a tag

This is the gist of what I meant. Whatever server you're on could register interest in those tags to servers they federate from on your behalf, so they receive them. But I don't know if AP supports that and what level of support for it there'd be in the various server software.

@jgaskins maybe built on top of ActivityPub collections... it's a good idea.

for ktistec, i've considered just adding support for polling/scraping/crawling URLs for content—the first version of the server did exactly that, before i built support for the protocol and inboxes/outboxes. (it's not really in the spirit of things, however...)