I have seen this gitlab issue before, and I'm very happy you are committed to it!

As I have not yet managed to get a good grasp of how Mangrove works, I haven't been fully able to wrap my head around what ActivityPub integration would mean for the platform, and how the two standards could potentially coexist in a fruitful way.

My biggest worry about Mangrove is moderation. It seems to me the job of identifying bad content currently falls squarely on Mangrove centrally, and that it a) presumes a "one size fits all" approach to moderation, and b) assumes it is up for the task at a scale. If Mangrove becomes huge the incentive and potential for abuse will both be huge, posing a gigantic moderation challenge. Unlike the Fediverse there does not seem to be an obvious solution for moderation on scale in place - attracting more reviewers would not automatically attract more or better moderators. Mangrove also seems very vulnerable to LLM spam which can be difficult to spot, but that the fediverse so far has been relatively good at avoiding.

Well-moderated fediverse instances seem to be uniquely good at keeping things human and blocking trolls, and we can choose instances with moderation criteria (and federation criteria) that fit our preferences. In effect my Mastodon account feels a bit like a protected bubble, showing me the parts of the Internet that I actually want to interact with. If I could choose to only see reviews by users not blocked by my instance that would be incredible.

I realize there are a bunch of challenges to this approach. Software displaying reviews would have to somehow connect to a federated instance to choose their moderation policy. All users would have to be federated, and if it falls behind on moderation the @mangrove.reviews instance itself might be defederated by other instances. And of course it could make the platform less open to non-federated users, which is obviously most of the internet.

Of course there are already a few review platforms on the Fediverse - Bookwyrm and NeoDB - but there's not yet any option to review locations. Still, any federated review platform should probably strive to be as close to those as possible on the technical level.

I'm sorry that this is very long and winding without any real point! I'm sure you've been thinking about these things as well.

And thank you so much for paving the way for all of this - I can't wait to start seeing Mangrove reviews appearing in Comaps! @mangroveReviews@mas.to