I think that would just increase the fragmentation LOL. It’s like that XKCD comic
Comment on we need more users
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks agoLet’s stop working on “Lemmy app” , “mbin app”, “PieFed app”, “Mastodon app” and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.
idunnololz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
It’s the complete opposite of that.
“Use ActivityPub directly for interacting with the social web graph” is the same as saying “Use HTTP and HTML directly to interact with the world wide web”.
The reason we don’t see different websites using different versions of HTTP, or that someone can open a HTML document on pretty much website and read its contents is because we are building the application on top of the protocol layer.
idunnololz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
But ActivityPud is very barebones so you will need to implement a lot of features. In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy
Indeed, I am. But to be perfectly honest, I’m doing a lot less work that I original thought in the server side, and when I get to start working on Mastodon compatibility, I will probably just change the internal implementation of mastodon’s js sdk.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
There is a difference between Mastodon and Lemmy because Mastodon is user-centric and Lemmy is content-centric. I wrote about this here
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
My point is that you can have a “content-centric” application separate from the “user-centric” application, but they are just different ways to represent and interact with the data in the social graph and as such they don’t separate APIs.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
yeah, i think embedding Lemmy content into Mastodon is trivial, because you just show the post. But the other way around, embedding Mastodon posts into Lemmy could be a bit more tricky, because in what community do you show the post? There could be a virtual community for each Mastodon server, like when you post something on mastodon.de, then it’s displayed on the lemmy community /c/all@mastodon.de
What do you think of this?
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
In ActivityPub terms, there is no such thing as a “Mastodon posts” or “Lemmy communities”. You just have “authors” and “audiences”. In effect, it would mean that you emulate a “post to a community” by writting a post with the community as the “audience”, and anyone that follows the actor that represents the group (equivalent to the Lemmy Community) would find the posts.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
phone apps can’t use activity pub as that’s a server protocol so if you want a good mobile interface you generally speaking need a rest-y api that an application can query. yes, lemmy and piefed both feature PWA frontends that can be installed to your homescreen, however on older phones this can be an extremely suboptimal experience as PWAs tend to require more RAM than native apps.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
You don’t need to get rid of the server. All I’m saying is that we can have a server that uses the ActivityPub API directly instead of these ad-hoc APIs for each different use case.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
i don’t understand how that negates the utility of a mobile app that presents this information. also i’m not saying to get rid of the server-client paradigm, not sure what you’re talking about
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
I am saying is that we can have a mobile app that can do anything that Lemmy does, but without requiring a “Lemmy API” to do it.
Any “Lemmy client” could in theory read and create posts/comments/votes/moderation reports directly by interacting with the actors outboxes. The same for any “Mastodon” client, or any “PeerTube client”.