I'm the author of an April Fool's Internet Standard, AMA - Lemmy
lemmy.ml
Let’s get the AMAs kicked off on Lemmy, shall we. Almost ten years ago now, I wrote RFC 7168 [https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7168], “Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances” which extends HTCPCP [https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2324] to handle tea brewing. Both Coffeepot Control Protocol and the tea-brewing extension are joke Internet Standards, and were released on Apr 1st (1998 and 2014). You may be familiar with HTTP error 418, “I’m a teapot”; this comes from the 1998 standard. I’m giving a talk on the history of HTTP and HTCPCP at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin later this month, and I need an FAQ section; AMA about the Internet and HTTP. Let’s try this out!
      • alr@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        That’s a harder proposition than you might think. On the one hand, UUIDs are mathematically guaranteed to be universally unique, which is great. On the other hand, there has to be some way to go from a UUID to a particular post, which suggests a lookup table, but the federated nature of Lemmy basically makes that impossible, since there’s no assurance that any instance is aware of any other instance.

        • Nato Boram@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          which suggests a lookup table

          No, it only suggests an additional field in the Post table

          since there’s no assurance that any instance is aware of any other instance

          It already works like that, but slightly worse because post IDs aren’t the same across instances. If you search a newly-created community from another instance here, you just won’t find it until it’s synced, despite its URI being unique.

          Thinking about it, it would be possible to have an URI for posts like post:${id}@instance.com, similar to how user URIs and community URIs are made. This way, you could open /post/1772651 on lemmy.world or post:1772651@lemmy.world on, idk, lemmy.blahaj.zone or something.