Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
Reminder that as of now, there is no independent Bluesky server open for registration: https://feddit.org/post/2656676
The interoperability issues between Mastodon and Lemmy come from Mastodon, which doesn’t really seem interested in correcting that: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/17008
Unpopular opinion: IDK why people want perfect interop so much, I have a Mastodon account and a Lemmy account, big deal. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than this. The formats are different enough that you’re better off having separate accounts for microblogging and threadiverse.
Interop for similar platforms is a great feature, but for dissimilar platforms I don’t think it’s actually necessary just a novelty. Also I think people try to push this on new users as some big, useful, important feature, but I think it only confuses the new users.
Also I noticed most of the time when people complain about ActivityPub interop issues, it almost always ends up being Mastodon’s fault lol. Probably because they were early to the party and didn’t have to worry about interop and standards much back then. At least I hope it isn’t malicious lol.
Don’t think this opinion is unpopular at all. It makes sense for platforms that are similar to interop.
Hypothetically like Youtube interop with Peertube (video platforms) or Instagram interop with Pixelfed (photos). Or Threads, Reddit and Lemmy (forums). And Mastodon and Twitter (sorry, but just making a point here 😁)
But yeah, see no reason for interop between platforms with completely different purposes.
i like having every post (from mastodon, lemmy, peertube, threads, pixelfed) in one single place
Have you tried http://fedia.io/ ? It has both Mastodon and Lemmy included in one place
That sort of aggregating would make more sense in an RSS reader. RSS feeds are exactly for that purpose.
But a platform trying to interop from an infinite number of unrelated platforms just seems odd.
Conceptually, I think the way Lemmy and Mastodon would be able to interop is pretty straightforward: Each thread in either is basically just a tree of replies. They are just shown differently depending on the platform. Furthermore, Lemmy communities show up as Mastodon groups, and Lemmy threads show up as retoots from those groups, which I think is the most elegant solution.
The only issue that makes this interoperation unusable really is that Mastodon groups representing Lemmy communities just “retoot” every single comment, obliterating the TL of anyone who dares to follow those groups. Which as far as I know only happens because Mastodon refuses to be cooperative and properly follow the standards.
As for the other comments asking “why even care about this”: I think it’s worth as a long-term goal for the Fediverse to entirely separate the “view” aspect from the “content” aspect of platforms where reasonably possible, so that each user can browse all the content in their preferred platform. Not all fedi platforms need to conform to some absolute feature parity, but as I just said, there’s basically a one-to-one relationship between Lemmy and Mastodon content, so it is reasonable in this case. I’ve seen enough people here claim that they very much prefer the Lemmy format to read conversations.
Personally, my Mastodon account has different vibes from Lemmy, and for that reason alone there is a bunch of Lemmy communities I wouldn’t subscribe to, but would follow from Mastodon. The only reason why I don’t do that is because Mastodon’s side of the interop fucking sucks.
The only issue that makes this interoperation unusable really is that Mastodon groups representing Lemmy communities just “retoot” every single comment, obliterating the TL of anyone who dares to follow those groups. Which as far as I know only happens because Mastodon refuses to be cooperative and properly follow the standards.
Pleroma/Akkoma deal better with this, The groups there only retoot the main topic, and the answers you only see If you open the main topic, then you see all the threads.
I think it’s worth as a long-term goal for the Fediverse to entirely separate the “view” aspect from the “content” aspect of platforms where reasonably possible
This perfectly describes my ideal fediverse, too. Pretty much everything we’re doing here is posting text; it can be a comment on someone else’s text, or a comment on a video, or a top-level post in a community, or a top-level post on your microblog (which is basically your own community where you’re the only top-level poster). IMO the type of fediverse server you choose should be based on which one has the best UI for the viewing and posting you’ll be doing most often, but they should all be able to show everyone else’s content as much as possible.
If I need to, I’ll create separate accounts for separate interests, like one for games and one for professional things. But I’d like to use the same account for following indie game developers (on Mastodon) and gaming communities (on Lemmy) and commenting on game review videos (on Peertube).
One thing that seems to go unappreciated in the comments is the simplicity of this interop proposal: It is essentially about enabling quote-posting of link-aggregator(Groups) posts.
Bluesky + Frontpage will work this way, and I believe it’ll work exceedingly well. If the ap-net corner of the fediverse isn’t interested in this kind of interop, fair enough. To me however the promise of seamless interop between my social apps was what brought me to the fediverse, so that’s the version of the fediverse I will pursue.
the promise of seamless interop between my social apps was what brought me to the fediverse, so that’s the version of the fediverse I will pursue.
That’s fair.
For some other people the appeal of the Fediverse is to be able to manage the instances themselves, and Bluesky still isn’t there yet on that side (and probably won’t, as it would prevent them from generating revenue if someone can just open a server and connect to their network)
Bluesky still isn’t there yet on that side (and probably won’t, as it would prevent them from generating revenue if someone can just open a server and connect to their network)
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. As fas as I know there are no plans to inject ads, they are planning to create a marketplace for custom feeds (think “premium” feeds) and labelers and such where they would take a cut. You would obviously still be able to purchase access to them from other servers. But this goal seems kinda lofty, not sure if it can be viable.
I also want interoperability between microblogging and threaded services, but unfortunately I’m a little skeptical about the account mirroring concept. Or, at least, I’d like more details about it.
Do users need to opt-in to have their accounts mirrored, like how they do with brid.gy right now? If there are a bunch of users with Bluesky accounts that don’t have Frontpage accounts, that would mess with the ability to have all comments showing up between the two services, and it would prevent some people from posting a comment on someone else’s comment if one of the commenters has not opted-in to have their account mirrored. Or, can a plain Bluesky account comment on Frontpage threads, but not start a thread?
I like the idea of being able to quote-post link aggregator threads to your Bluesky account, but I think ideally this would only require one account. Which would mean you could also use your Bluesky account to start a thread on Frontpage.
Sorry for the late reply, but I wanted to address your question – I think one misunderstanding is: in a sense there are no Bluesky accounts and there are no Frontpage accounts, there are only atproto accounts. Whether you make a post on Bluesky or Frontpage or Whitewind or Smokesignal, all of them get collected in the same repository. Here is a neat atproto browser which can display this, this is the account of Frontpage founder Tom Sherman and you can find all of his collections there: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/tom-sherman.com
I also think that this is how it should be. Initially I thought I wouldn’t need multiple accounts for the fediverse. Right now I’m more active on Bluesky than on Mastodon so it would be great to have an AT Protocol equivalent to Lemmy/Reddit and all that without having to create a new account for it.
Bluesky is not a part of the fediverse. If they don’t want to use standards and the devs cry about how it is absolutely impossible to integrate the features of ATProto into ActivityPub, then they can fuck off.
Why isn’t anyone mentioning Kbin? Isn’t that basically already a lemmy/mastodon mix
Even on Mbin, the microblogging and link aggregator are two different parts of the software.
If someone from Mastodon posts to an Mbin magazine, it would still look “out of the place” the same way it would in a Lemmy community
Makes sense. But your feed contains both mastodon posts and lemmy posts iirc?
The homepage contains the communities (e.g. Lemmy): https://fedia.io/
The microblog page contains the… microblogs (e.g. Mastodon): https://fedia.io/microblog
That’s why I said it’s two different views, you can’t have everything at the same time, it’s one or the other
