Comment on Why do a lot of fediverse instances put their software (i.e. Lemmy/Mastodon) in their name somehow?
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months agoIdk 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.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Isn’t this just the difference between an API and a protocol?
The payload of a message for one social network will be different based on the capabilities of that type. There are API architectures that are discoverable, like HATEOAS, but that only gets you so far (and that example is based on HTTP not Activitypub).
I don’t really see anything wrong, in the absence of a standard body, for each social network to define its own activity type, since they typically have some degree of unique capabilities anyways.