Comment on Why is Pixelfed an extra network and not just a Mastodon client?
CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 1 week agoI 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.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
Not “stored on activitypub”, but each book could be represented with RDF (it could be something as sophisticated as using DublinCore or as simple as just using isbns to uniquely identity the books (
urn:isbn:1234556789) , and then each activity for “CombatWombatEsq read a book” would be an activity where you are the actor and the book is the object.CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Right, but I don’t want to enter the isbn to say that I’m reading a book, I want to search by title or author. Once you achieve any kind of scale, whoever your client is scraping to get the book data for those kinds of queries is going to block you; practically speaking you need to keep an index of books on your server to allow people to discover the books that are available? Clients have pretty limited abilities in practice, because there aren’t a lot of services that vend well-curated data for free.