Comment on Why do a lot of fediverse instances put their software (i.e. Lemmy/Mastodon) in their name somehow?
rglullis@communick.news 10 months agoYou want to know if this server is part of that social network.
Hard disagree. There are no separate social networks, and it is not the software that makes the network. That is the whole point of the Fediverse. I shouldn’t care about the identity of the servers, all I should care is about the having a common language and a way to identify the actors.
If a user can not post a picture on Pixelfed and other people can not vote on it, then it’s a shortcoming of the software, not an integral quality of the system. I could switch my Lemmy server to, e.g. Takahe with extensions to support voting and you would be none the wiser.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Idk what to tell you then. Not only is that not how activitypub works, not all fediverse networks even use activitypub. Idk where you’re getting your definition of fediverse, or how you think that’s even possible. You can’t have every app/network support every feature of every other.
Imagine I make a fediverse MMO turn based RPG. How is a Lemmy app support to present that? How am I supposed to consume that from a mastadon server? Mastadon shouldn’t need to support turn based MMORPGs, and MMORPGs shouldn’t need to support streaming video.
There is not only is there no common API for fediverse networks, there isn’t even a common protocol.
rglullis@communick.news 10 months ago
You don’t.
There is no place that says that a client needs to process every message that is received on an actor inbox. It doesn’t mean that one client should support only one specific type of activity, or even servers for that matter.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Maybe I don’t understand your position then.
Fediverse doesn’t make any claims for SSO or shared user accounts between server types. And servers aren’t required to interoperate with servers of other types. And clients aren’t required to interoperate with multiple server types.
It’s nice when servers and client do Interop between types (what I’m calling networks for lack of better word), but that’s not really fundamental to the fediverse, and is pretty rare. Afaict the only requirement is that servers of the same type can interoperate with eachother and user accounts from other servers of the same type are addressable.
rglullis@communick.news 10 months ago
That is the problem. Assuming that we need different “server types” is a mistake made by Mastodon that benefitted them in the short term but screwed the developers who were looking at activitypub as a simple protocol for bidirectional exchange of data.
What we need is smarter clients and let the servers be completely dumb relays. Instead of thinking of “Mastodon API” or “Pixelfed API” or “Lemmy API”, we could be looking at a single browser extension that could talk Activity Stream directly with the server, let the client be responsible for signing messages and know how to present the context when/how to serve the different activity types.