Submitted 2 months ago by matcha_addict@lemy.lol to fediverse@lemmy.world
Is there any fediverse client out there (mobile or pc or web) that has support for multiple types of content, rather than just for one?
Most apps I find are only mastodon-like (including pleroma etc.), or only lemmy-like, or only peertube-like. One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that I could theoretically access all of those from one platform. But the clients I saw don’t seem to support it too well.
It’s a hard user experience design problem to create an interface that presents all possible types of posts, content and interactions in a sensible way. This “kitchen sink” approach is kind of what Facebook does and as a result its interface is messy and cluttered. That’s not to say it’s impossible or wrong to do things that way, just difficult and unpopular.
On the technical side, it’s really hard to make a client app that works with multiple server softwares, because they all have different sets of features.
In the current world of fedi software development, it would be a single dev or a small, likely unpaid team that would have to make the equivalent of several different client apps combined into one. I don’t anticipate such a large and complicated project being completed until the devs can make a decent living doing the work.
I don’t think so. The closest might be fedilab. They support masto+ forks, pixelfed, peertube, and many of the misskey forks partially (with fuller support promised). No Lemmy/mbin though and I haven’t seen anything saying that support is on the roadmap.
Even Fedilab is limited.
Sure, most “Fediverse apps” are Mastodon apps which allow you to use anything that supports the Mastodon API, but which only offer you Mastodon’s feature set, maybe even only the feature set of Mastodon 3 if the app is old enough.
Fedilab has specific features of other projects coded in. After all, it’s made by Pixelfed’s creator and developer, so it has to support as many Pixelfed features as possible, even if Mastodon doesn’t have them.
But Fedilab doesn’t have all features of all supported projects. For example, Fedilab does not have the necessary extra entry field for post titles on Friendica.
For sure, support isn’t always complete and the Masto API is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think that Fedilab really wants to be a Fediverse app though. I’m pretty sure their development has slowed a lot in the last year too because their dev has had some health issues. Although it’s “tom79,” not Dansup (who makes Pixelfed and a million other things).
I don’t think it supports Pixelfed-exclusive features either. I don’t think there’s even an app that supports stories right now - even the official one.
It isn’t just types of content that makes a fully featured, unified Fediverse client nigh-impossible. It’s features in general.
It all starts with having one unified timeline for any arbitrary number of Fediverse identities on any arbitrary number of different Fediverse servers. Nicely convenient. You only open one app, and you’ve got them all. Not even separated timelines within the same app, TweetDeck-style. No, you have posts on your three Mastodon accounts under posts on your Pixelfed account under posts on your Lemmy account under posts on your Friendica account, maybe even under posts on your Hubzilla channel if the app isn’t limited to the Mastodon API, and if it supports multiple identities under one login.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Maybe you want to reply to a post. Or you want to post something yourself.
And, of course, you don’t want to stick with the basics that Mastodon offers. Maybe you want to use text formatting.
So text formatting has to be implemented. But it has to be deactivated if you want to post to one of your Mastodon accounts, but it has to be reactivated if one of them is actually on Glitch.
Next trouble: Not everything that supports text formatting supports standard Markdown. Misskey and its various forks use “Misskey-flavoured Markdown”. On Friendica, Markdown is optional and off by default, and BBcode is the standard. On Hubzilla, Markdown is not available at all, only BBcode is, and it comes with a whole slew of extras specific to Mike Macgirvin’s nomadic projects from Red (2012) to Forte (2024). So yes, you may want support for things like [zmg][/zmg], [zrl=][/zrl] or [observer.baseurl].
Of course, if you are on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams), you’re used to having a post preview. Code-heavy posting like on these three makes it a requirement; pure plain-text posting like on Mastodon doesn’t. But the preview button must be able to faithfully render any post just like its native server application would render it. No matter what it’ll be. Oh, and if you’ve got NSFW activated on your Friendica account or your Hubzilla or (streams) channel, the preview must be hidden behind an automatically generated content warning.
Speaking of which, Mastodon-style CWs aren’t unified either. Depending on the server, they would have to go into the CW field, the summary field, [abstract=apub][/abstract] (Friendica), [summary][/summary] (streams) or nowhere at all (e.g. Lemmy, replies on Hubzilla).
The Fediverse has various different ways of quote-posting, and Mastodon doesn’t have quote-posts at all. The Threadiverse has dislikes/downvotes/thumbs-down, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) optionally have them, too, but others don’t. Misskey and the Forkeys have emoji reactions. Hubzilla has only twelve emojis, and clicking one creates a whole new comment with only that emoji in it. Friendica lets you hashtag other people’s posts, so does (streams) optionally, but only they themselves even understand this feature.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) also have categories, much like a blog, next to hashtags. At least on Hubzilla and (streams), they’re optional. But they require their own text field which the app must have, too, depending on the availability of this feature.
This goes further and further. After all, you may not just want basic functionality for when you aren’t on your computer. Maybe you don’t have a computer. Maybe your phone is the only digital end-user device you possess. So the app would have to cover not only the bare necessities (read, reply, post etc.), but everything.
For example, someone wants to follow you. On Mastodon, you just confirm it if you’ve set your account up to do so manually, and you’re done.
On Hubzilla with enough optional features activated, you assign a contact role to the new contact to give it the permissions you want to grant it, you add it to one or multiple privacy groups, you choose which profile that contact can see, you adjust the affinity slider, you may even want to pre-fill the per-contact filter lists (one allowlist, one blocklist), and then you confirm the new connection. Upon which Hubzilla automatically follows that connection back. Oh, and then you can still block or ignore or archive a connection or set it to invisible. On (streams), it’s somewhat similar, but since you can grant individual permissions to specific contacts in addition to a pre-defined permission role, you’ve got even more options.
A unified, daily-driver Fediverse app that’s supposed to fully replace Web interfaces would have to offer UI elements for all these settings. And only when they’re actually needed.
Don’t get me started about settings and options. Again, the app would have to mirror all of them. Many people have never touched the Web UI of their Fediverse servers, and they don’t intend to. They do everything on their phones with dedicated apps.
On Hubzilla, this would include access to Hubzilla’s built-in “apps”. “Install”, “uninstall” and configure them. Many important optional features are “apps”. But amongst these “apps”, there are also things like articles, wikis and Web pages. And what would being able to turn these features on and off be worth if you couldn’t use them in the app? And so the app will also have to provide access to Hubzilla’s articles and wikis and Web pages with all bells and whistles.
Of course, whenever a Fediverse server app changes in a way that makes changes in the UI necessary, this unified mobile app would have to follow suit immediately.
Yep, all this ^^^
This is also one of the reasons why I believe ActivityPub client-to-server failed and will likely never gain much traction. It either needs every single client to re-implement all the features it wants from scratch, or the entire ecosystem needs to be dumbed down to fit a single mold. Leave all the unique functionality in “uncommon” software like (streams) and friends, even software like Lemmy or PeerTube would likely be extremely difficult to build in a world where client-to-server actually became a thing.
The only way I can see C2S actually taking off is as IPC between an “app server” (which would be the equivalent of Mastodon or Lemmy or (streams)) and a “federation server” which is just a dumb pipe that distributes and receives objects and activities, and even that has it’s fair share of concerns, both around efficiency and the same “dumbing down” problem.
If you really need it to be a proper mobile app then it's unlikely you'll find one - this would be quite a lot of work as every platform has implemented it's own API for talking with client apps, rather than using ActivityPub. The app would need to talk to several different APIs.
You're better off choosing a platform that can talk with as many different types of other platforms as possible. And when I say 'talk with' there will be gradients of talking with differing amounts of problems. For example PieFed is great with Lemmy, good with PeerTube and Ok with Mastodon. Then use the client app for your chosen platform.
Choosing the platform will be a process of just trying them all. Check out friendica, they cast a wide net.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Unpopular Opinion:
Fuck apps.
Use web browsers.
matcha_addict@lemy.lol 2 months ago
I would be glad if a unified web client exists. Mobile app is not necessary.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
I’m not actually super familiar with the unified web clients, but you could be right that one is out there, or perhaps we’re just asking too soon in the general Fediverse development cycle. In a year or two, someone might have designed something like that, perhaps with a post like this as inspiration.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Just split the difference and give me PWAs. Let The matrix tell my brain the steak is chewy and delicious.
JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Hubzilla and (streams) can be installed as PWAs.
halm@leminal.space 2 months ago
So maybe an inelegantly hacked together startpage that shows all your feeds in one for the morning coffee?
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
ngl web apps are even worse, they’re so bloated and janky, I wish everything had a native app