Webfinger (and similar systems) can store meta data about an actor, but we seem to only use webfinger for endpoint / uri discovery.

My understanding is that we ask a social media server (e.g. a mastodon instance) for the ActivityPub outbox for “@user@server.com” and maybe some other info.

But I’m sure it can store anything we like, so why not social graph stuff? I’m mainly thinking about connections and interests.

E.g. mine would list all the ActivityPub accounts I follow and then a list of topics I’m interested in. Then everyone in that list who I follow would have a file that did the same.

Why then, can I not query these files for all ActivityPub accounts, up to 4 degrees of separation away, that are interested in Cycling or Football?

I feel like the fediverse in missing a trick. It’s a halfway house between an algorithm on-boarding you and the cack-handed manual discovery that is being relied on currently.

But this is such an obvious thought, I must be missing something.