What are you thoughts about this?
I’m not sure ActivityPub is suitable for implementation of Lemmy/Kbin. ActivityPub seems to be a push (with retry) protocol, where if a message gets lost, the protocol doesn’t seem to have a means to recover synchronization. Theoretically, instances could verify synchronization on a periodic basis, but that would be a massive increase in traffic.
This was a good read and it’s something I’ve wondered about. The fediverse is sorta built on this promise that everyone will be able to interact across any implementation of ActivityPub.
But that’s not really true. The different types of social media have wildly different implementations, where we have to rely on developers communicating and cooperating with other implementations for everything to work even a little bit
Yea probably similar to how Lemmy and Kbin are theoretically compatible. ActivityPub doesn’t guarantee that, it’s only because they happen to use ActivityPub in the same way. If one of them changes their implementation, compatibility breaks.
I do often wonder how much it matters that all these platforms use ActivityPub
I think it might be good to create specific protocols in the ActivityPub documentation for the various types of social media to ensure interoperability.
No hard rules, but a guideline for how to ensure you are maximizing compatibility, maybe.
In about a year we’ll probably have that anyway. Practices like that will emerge as people get more experience running fediverse servers, and then they’ll get adopted by people trying to do what’s known to work
A better analogy is how Lemmy and Mastodon are theoretically compatible. Yeah, you can get federated content, but it really isn’t usable.
Kbin is just a different implementation of Lemmy, intended to be compatible (not coincidentally compatible through the protocol).
I might have to look at ActivityPub after this. I mean I saw framework mentioned enough where it sounds like we should have built something using ActivityPub as a framework to ensure compatibility in the fediverse. Or am I reading that wrong? Very interesting article. I would expect we all need to get comfortable with changing and questioning things if we want to build something truly decentralized and truly connected.
We did build stuff on ActivityPub: Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon etc. are all based on that underlying protocol.
