Comment on Why is Pixelfed an extra network and not just a Mastodon client?
ignirtoq@feddit.online 1 week ago
Bluesky is one, single platform. It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases and provides that through its data stream and APIs. This means every different client someone writes has access to all the same data as every other client, because they’re all going through Bluesky. This also means if Bluesky doesn’t support some feature, no clients can either.
The architecture of the Fediverse is different. Forgetting ActivityPub for a moment, Mastodon is one platform and Pixelfed is another. This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs. Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features. I don’t use either, but I expect there are image-related features in Pixelfed that are just not possible in a Mastodon client, not because someone hasn’t written a client capable of it, but because Mastodon doesn’t have the internal data storage nor API to support it in any client.
Where ActivityPub comes in is a unified stream language. When a post pops up on a platform, that platform has the complete data and translates as much as it can into an ActivityPub message to send to other platforms. Some platforms haven’t figured out yet how to pack all of their relevant data into an ActivityPub message, so some data may be lost in the sending. And different platforms may not support storing all the data in a given ActivityPub message they receive, especially if it’s from a feature they don’t provide, so some data may be lost in the receiving.
Ultimately this means even with ActivityPub linking things together, the data flow isn’t perfect/complete. So different data is available to any even theoretical Mastodon client compared to a Pixelfed client because the backend platforms are different. Their APIs expose different data in different, often incompatible ways, so even if someone wrote an image-focused client for Mastodon, it wouldn’t be possible to do everything an image-focused client for Pixelfed could do, because the backend platforms focus on different things.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
That is not fully correct. The index the data from the different personal data servers, and they host the largest personal data server out there, but you can have your own PDS and interact with other Bluesky users without having to rely on their data.
Yeah, but why? ActivityPub already provides the “data model” and the API. Internal storage is an implementation detail. Why do we continue to accept this idea that each different mode of interaction with the social graph requires an entirely separate server?
Like OP said, on bluesky is possible to have different “shells” that interact with the network. Why wouldn’t that be possible on ActivityPub?
ademir@lemmy.eco.br 3 days ago
Oi! Vou falar com outros devs brasileiros amanhã sobre criar um implementação genérica do protocolo, com diferentes módulos para cada API (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc) mastodon.social/@kariboka/116032991048115380
Gostaria de te convidar pra dar ideias ou participar o quanto você puder/quiser
rglullis@communick.news 3 days ago
Cara, eu já estou com com uns 70% da API do Lemmy implementada, e passei esse fim de semana todo trabalhando numa entensão pro browser que “puxa” o grafo social localmente e mostra os dados, como se fosse um browser. Quero ver se consigo fazer posts via C2S antes de ir dormir. :)
Tudo isso pra dizer: sim, eu tenho muito pitaco pra dar nessa história…
CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think I’m gradually coming around to the “why does each different mode of interaction require an entirely different server” view, but it seems impractical somehow. My impression is that projects like Mastodon, Lemmy, PieFed, Bookwyrm etc have lots of work being done on them, and building an “everything server” that implements every message you might want to send is prohibitive just in terms of complexity and scope. Is there something I’m missing? Or is it really the case that someday, someone will build a server on emissary that you can point your tiktok-like client or your instagram-like client or your twitter-like client at, and every one of them is just a different view on the same social graph?
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
It is not. A server that “speaks” the ActivityPub is not that difficult to build, I’ve done it. The complexity is in getting the data from the social graph into and creating a good UX for users who are too used with the “app-centric” mentality.
CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 1 week ago
🤔🤔🤔
I’m still not sure I quite get it. Like, Bookwyrm has to have all of those books for me to create a message that embeds the book I’m reading. Without knowledge of all of the books that one might read, I can’t select the one I want to read? Or are all of the books objects stored on activitypub and I get the data from the social graph itself? Does the subject-verb-predicate structure of json-ld allow for embedding the full complexity of data that not only represents the social graph, but also everything else you might want to reference?
Also, thanks for the link. Looks like the docs are also a reasonable reference on Activitypub as well as being for your server.