Hey group,
Why is there not a Mastodon client to only utilize the media grid and pack it into an Instagram layout?
When I was exploring Bluesky and its clients a while ago, I actually liked the approach of having one central protocol and then having clients strip different masks over it. The Flashes app, for example, packed the media posts from your regular Microblog-profile into a Instagram-layout, while still keeping all your regular followings.
The federation between Pixelfed instances and Masto instances doesn’t seem to be 100% working to my eyes. Likewise, when I look at my Pixelfed account via Masto client, it doesnt show me the pictures in the media grid.
I know this touches the very core of ActivityPub federation, but during the last years I couldn’t figure out why fedi-networks never interacted completely.
Please correct me if I got something wrong or you know about obvious alternatives that I haven’t stumbled upon yet.
Cheers! Enjoy the sun today!
Bluesky is one, single platform. It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases and provides that through its data stream and APIs. This means every different client someone writes has access to all the same data as every other client, because they’re all going through Bluesky. This also means if Bluesky doesn’t support some feature, no clients can either.
The architecture of the Fediverse is different. Forgetting ActivityPub for a moment, Mastodon is one platform and Pixelfed is another. This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs. Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features. I don’t use either, but I expect there are image-related features in Pixelfed that are just not possible in a Mastodon client, not because someone hasn’t written a client capable of it, but because Mastodon doesn’t have the internal data storage nor API to support it in any client.
Where ActivityPub comes in is a unified stream language. When a post pops up on a platform, that platform has the complete data and translates as much as it can into an ActivityPub message to send to other platforms. Some platforms haven’t figured out yet how to pack all of their relevant data into an ActivityPub message, so some data may be lost in the sending. And different platforms may not support storing all the data in a given ActivityPub message they receive, especially if it’s from a feature they don’t provide, so some data may be lost in the receiving.
Ultimately this means even with ActivityPub linking things together, the data flow isn’t perfect/complete. So different data is available to any even theoretical Mastodon client compared to a Pixelfed client because the backend platforms are different. Their APIs expose different data in different, often incompatible ways, so even if someone wrote an image-focused client for Mastodon, it wouldn’t be possible to do everything an image-focused client for Pixelfed could do, because the backend platforms focus on different things.
That is not fully correct. The index the data from the different personal data servers, and they host the largest personal data server out there, but you can have your own PDS and interact with other Bluesky users without having to rely on their data.
Yeah, but why? ActivityPub already provides the “data model” and the API. Internal storage is an implementation detail. Why do we continue to accept this idea that each different mode of interaction with the social graph requires an entirely separate server?
Like OP said, on bluesky is possible to have different “shells” that interact with the network. Why wouldn’t that be possible on ActivityPub?
I think I’m gradually coming around to the “why does each different mode of interaction require an entirely different server” view, but it seems impractical somehow. My impression is that projects like Mastodon, Lemmy, PieFed, Bookwyrm etc have lots of work being done on them, and building an “everything server” that implements every message you might want to send is prohibitive just in terms of complexity and scope. Is there something I’m missing? Or is it really the case that someday, someone will build a server on emissary that you can point your tiktok-like client or your instagram-like client or your twitter-like client at, and every one of them is just a different view on the same social graph?
It is not. A server that “speaks” the ActivityPub is not that difficult to build, I’ve done it. The complexity is in getting the data from the social graph into and creating a good UX for users who are too used with the “app-centric” mentality.
🤔🤔🤔
I’m still not sure I quite get it. Like, Bookwyrm has to have all of those books for me to create a message that embeds the book I’m reading. Without knowledge of all of the books that one might read, I can’t select the one I want to read? Or are all of the books objects stored on activitypub and I get the data from the social graph itself? Does the subject-verb-predicate structure of json-ld allow for embedding the full complexity of data that not only represents the social graph, but also everything else you might want to reference?
Also, thanks for the link. Looks like the docs are also a reasonable reference on Activitypub as well as being for your server.
Not “stored on activitypub”, but each book could be represented with RDF (it could be something as sophisticated as using DublinCore or as simple as just using isbns to uniquely identity the books (
urn:isbn:1234556789) , and then each activity for “CombatWombatEsq read a book” would be an activity where you are the actor and the book is the object. Then it would be up to the client to expand that information. Your client app could take the ISBN and query wikidata, or Amazon, or nothing at all…Right, but I don’t want to enter the isbn to say that I’m reading a book, I want to search by title or author. Once you achieve any kind of scale, whoever your client is querying to get the book data for those kinds of queries is going to block you; practically speaking you need to keep an index of books on your server to allow people to discover the books that are available? Clients have pretty limited abilities in practice, because there aren’t a lot of services that vend well-curated data for free.
Edit: I’m not trying to disagree, I’m seeking to understand because it is clear you have a vision that I haven’t got my head around.
You know that the whole of wikidata can be copied with just a few hundreds of GBs, right? There are plenty of examples of community-driven data providers (especially in the *arr space), so I can bet that there would be more people setting up RDF data servers (which is mostly read-heavy, public data sharing) than people willing to set up their Mastodon/Lemmy/GoToSocial server - because that involves replicating data from everyone else, dealing with network partitions, etc…
Also, there are countless ways to make this less dependent on any big server, the client could pull specific subsets of the data and cache data locally so the more they are used the less they would need to fetch remote resources.
Think of it like this: a client-first application that understands linked data would be no different than a traditional web browser, but the main difference is that the client would only use json-ld and not HTML.