Very often I hear from users and ex-users of the Fediverse, that they they complain about posts that never reached their accounts. For example they subscribed to a hashtag on two accounts on separate servers. Now they see that both servers deliver different posts.
A solution for that are relay servers. But not every admin wants to receive thousands of unwanted posts just receive the few ones with content that a user wanted.
A solution for that would be a relay server that would be able to deliver content based on some rules that the admin defined. This should be much more than just a list of hashtags. It should be possible to filter on content in any field of a message.
What do you think about this idea? I’m currently in the process of thinking about a way to communicate these filter conditions.
ActivityPub needs some kind of query language. Implementations can use it to request a subset of activities when following an actor (incl. relay actors), and to filter collections. I think FEP-6606 is a good starting point.
Would be good to have some unified search pattern structures. Concerning that discussion: When you are only interested in in a low number of posts, then it doesn’t make sense to receive all others as well.
An activitypub relay based on rules makes sense. Filtering by hashtags, actors or message fields can reduce unnecessary traffic and improve consistency of delivery. Maybe FEP-6606 is a good basis for that approach: Convenience functions, too. For example.