Nothing stopping them, except, you know, the law… They can certainly display content that was not marked for public display. They will then proceed to get sued out of existence… If they do this automatically I’ll just privately post a music file with copyright protected music. Which is perfectly fine to do if it is indeed hidden from everyone. If they then publicly post it that’s on them and now I get to see the Music Industry fight the Zuck :D

Hi, I’m well aware of those APIs, but the idea was to find a unified way using ActivityPub. As it stands AP seems to actually have this glaring omission at its core. I’m somewhat baffled how this skipped past so many interations. What you mentioned is certainly a valid option to access data on lemmy. But it won’t work on Mastodon, or any other service only linked via ActivityPub Federation. And that’s a problem. It splits the network apart at the seams.

You actually described my expectation in that last paragraph. I fully expected to have to invent a curated list of endpoints. What I instead found was that even given an endpoint (like beehaw.org) there is no way to discover what is on that instance. Which is a big issue. I’ve discussed this a bit (albeit extremely slowly) with the folks in the activitypub irc, and pretty much got it confirmed. If you want to develop a service that is intent on delivering any form of public content at all, supporting activitypub, then you have no protocol based way of communicating this content to anyone. So going by that the lemmy implementation is actually “correct”, in as much as the protocol simply fails to provide guidance for this critical step.