Right, yeah, I get that we can't change the policies of these individual servers... But is there a way to at least programmatically report back to Nostr users whether their comments will even be heard, given a particular user they're interacting with?
Discussion
This is actually not a bad idea, like a little red exclamation mark or no-wifi symbol or some other clear visual indicator next to a non-federating ActivityPub user's handle. And/or the symbol could show up on one's own replies if there are any issues present, maybe with a hover-over pop-up that lists who in the thread can and can't see your reply.
I'm not sure how difficult this would be to implement technically, but something in the UI to help the user understand federation / bridging issues would definitely be helpful, be it for issues caused by defederation, or for issues on our end with sending out the posts.
I think this is crucial, IMHO.
As far as I can tell, most Nostr users just block Mostr and Momostr as their "starting pack" instructions. And I don't necessarily blame them. Look at my past several comments to Mastodon users. I haven't heard back from a single one.
And when I go to those Mastodon instances, I never see my comment replies on the post that got "bridged." Did my post ever make it back to the original instance? Was it rejected for "reasons"? Was it ever seen by the user I replied to?
I will say that, as someone with more experience on Fedi than Nostr, that it isn't uncommon at all to run into reply threads where you can't see half of the participants because of your instance's defed list, so us being able to see these users at all is a step up in that regard, but I do agree that some kind of visual indicator to differentiate ActivityPub users that can interact with us from ones who can't would be a really good idea.
So let me get this straight... Is it the case that IF an instance federates with Mostr, then we SHOULD expect the bridge to be 2-way?
Or are there other aspects of the interaction (user preferences etc) that dictate this?
I believe other aspects are at play, but my understanding is that if the Fedi instance is federating with Mostr, the interactions should be 2-way, yes.
I think there are some technicalities in how federation works / populates that may make connectivity <100% reliable, but these are nuances that Alex would know better than me. I'm basically just here to give a tech-illiterate end user perspective lol