Big soup; feeds and queries

Big soup big soup big soup. It’s a little phrase that bumbles around my head a lot when it comes to organizing or manipulating information.

R Scott Jones had a post that got me thinking about this again.

I would be really interested in figuring out an ActivityPub server/service/thing that just…shows it all? Raw? Puts it in a DB that you can query?

So much of what we interact with online is fed to us, but it doesn’t seem crazy to want a system that’s query-driven instead of consumption-driven: instead of taking what you can get, everything is available to you and you ask for what you want to see.

I mean, you don’t even need to organize a “feed” or “stream” or whatever—the posts only need to be there when you look at it! Why make it more complicated by having a “I would like to sit here and see posts as the come in”, when you could instead just have a “I want to see some posts, let me see them.”

If we wanted to get fancy, could maybe have some “bookmark” thing so you could be like “show me all X since the last book mark”. And then in-bookmarked stuff is a kind of manual analogue for “new”/“unread”.

“Hello please tell the machine what you are trying to do”.

This could go the other way, too, for “posting”: if you want to post something, maybe you likewise have to say what you want to post and how (e.g. message type, any relationships to entities like other people or tags or topics), instead of it just defaulting to something. Defaults are fine, but it would be neat if those defaults were transparent and malleabl.