Relationship endpoint

[trwnh]

Obtaining information about your relationship with another account currently requires stitching together statements from many other sources:

• Are you following them?
• Are they one of your followers?
• Are they blocked?
• etc

Something like https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/#relationships can help bundle all that disparate information into a single entity or response, without having to page through an entire followers collection + an entire following collection + maybe an entire outbox + maybe still missing something or getting something wrong.

AS2 has a Relationship type that is underutilized. It could be used here.

[evanp]

I love this! I see two ways to do it:

1. An endpoint in the endpoints object, which takes an actor id as a parameter, and returns an object or a collection of objects that illustrate the relationship. I agree that Relationship is probably the clearest, but one or more Follow activities might also work here (the incoming and outgoing ones).
2. Some kind of annotation on the actor object. So when I fetch a local actor or a remote actor through my proxy, an annotation with the relationship is added.

I feel a little queasy about this kind of annotation -- we don't do a good job with this yet. So I'd feel more comfortable with 1.

[evanp]

One way to quickly find out "do you follow them?" or "do they follow you?" is with the seekItem feature. "Is this actor ID in my following collection?" "Is this actor ID in my followers collection?" This isn't a single request for all relationships, but it's a lot better than a linear scan of the collection.