Post · Bonfire social

I think the #ActivityPub client-to-server API is extremely important and underrated. I’m glad to see the SWF and W3C group prioritizing it, because I think it has the potential to fix something that’s kind of broken on the #Fediverse: too many accounts, on too many platforms that really ought to be clients.

Here’s the rub, though: you need the big players in the space to support it. Mastodon needs to support it. Pixelfed and PeerTube need to support it.

So, how do you get the big existing projects to all implement it? How do you justify it?

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Sean Tilley

@[email protected] replied · 3 days ago

Here’s the thing: Mastodon already has a really good API. There’s a whole ecosystem of clients around it, to the point that many other Fediverse implementations adopted it, so that they can use the apps.

I don’t think this is a bad thing in and of itself. But, if we want projects like Mastodon to support it, the value proposition has to provide things that the Mastodon API does not.

I think a killer feature to focus on would be identity management.

Sean Tilley

@[email protected] replied · 3 days ago

Bluesky absolutely got it right with ATproto: you can make any kind of client, not just microblogging, and it will seamlessly work with your Bluesky identity. Everything you post goes into your personal storage, and the clients that know how to interpret special data types are able to reach into your PDS and the timelines you’re following to present that stuff.

ActivityPub API needs to follow a similar story.