I’m reading the ActivityPub spec here and it seems pretty fit for client-to-server communications. Yeah, it might be somewhat bulkier than your typical rest api, but it’s more universal, which begs the question: why do mastodon and lemmy both decided to implement custom (and incompatible) APIs for their clients to talk to the servers? Wouldn’t it be more straightforward if e.g. my voyager app talked ActivityPub to lemmy.world which then talked ActivityPub to lemmy.ml or something.
What am I missing?
The underlying assumption is that we need to have separate applications. Why is that? Why can’t the client define how to present/ sort/act on the data?
In that case, why don’t everyone just use a generic fediverse server and let the clients make it into Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/Pixelfed/Friendica/Firefish/PeerTube/whatever else?
The reason is all those server implementations work differently, have different features, different goals, even different cultures and etiquette, or even just for the heck of it. That’s the point of the fediverse, it’s interoperable but you’re also not limited by one single standard as to how you want to expand. Lets say we settle for Mastodon’s implementation. Cool, now people want downvotes. Mastodon doesn’t do downvotes, but it’s the reference implementation. You can’t have downvotes, you’ll never have downvotes unless you convince everyone to implement downvotes. Nobody will want to make a server that does everything. Maybe the Mastodon guys don’t want to implement downvotes because it promotes negativity and they’d rather posts just stay at zero likes. Maybe a site is implementing an additional score for funny/serious. What do we do, do we just allow clients to include any data they want?
Even if it worked that way, eventually, people would still make servers with proprietary UIs and proprietary features and APIs. You just can’t stop it, developers gonna develop.
Also, if every client supported every format, it would be a nightmare to make clients. And still, there would always be clients with different takes on how to present the data anyway, because again, developers gonna develop. People get creative and do their own thing, and it’s how cool stuff gets born.
If you make a rigid spec outlining every possible feature, then you need a group of people to decide what the spec is, and eventually, people are gonna get tired and make an entirely different protocol anyway, but this time it may not be interoperable.
You’re always gonna end up with specialized servers, and matching specialized clients.
If you want to make a superserver and superclient that supports everything, go ahead and make one. It may take off, it may not.
Ultimately, the fediverse will grow organically, custom implementations will happen if not only for personal toys, because there’s no governing body making a hard spec. And it’s a good thing for things to have a chance to last, or inenevitably there will be disagreements and lead to forks.
How is pushing for a single megaimplementation a good thing?
Yeah, I’d love that!
Just like the world wide web has always worked, and we managed to get by with only one single client (the web browser)?
Then we’d be off by a really bad start, because Mastodon does not implement a lot of the ActivityPub standard and hides a bunch of functionality under their own API?
Maybe we are talking about different layers of the OSI model, but the spec I’m concerned about already exists.
No, there is no need for a “superserver”. Other than storing messages, the server doesn’t really need to do much. Everything else can be done by the clients. There is also no need for a “superclient”, we can have different clients doing different things depending on what we want.
My point is that I don’t mind have separate “lemmy” and “mastodon” clients to have the respective “link sharing” and “microblogging” applications, but I do mind the fact that I need to register two separate accounts and two separate actor identities to do it, because currently these applications are providing functionality on the server-side that could (should?) be on the client.