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.
@erlend_sh hello from Mastodon!
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
I have a question, and I’m legitimately asking in good faith, because I am confused by this obsession about Mastodon compatibility.
Basically, why?
Mastodon doesn’t give a shit about being a good citizen and very much has issues they’ve said they won’t fix. And frankly, if Mastodon devs don’t appear to care, why is everyone else so concerned about it?
Let them silo into their own little safe space, and maybe push people to use other platforms that ARE willing to be good Fedi-citizens.
(Also I hate how Masto-user posts show up with the @s and endless hashtags: they don’t conform to how Lemmy posts look and work, and I’d legitimately consider just blocking all the Mastodon posters until they don’t look and feel weird and out of place.)
And frankly, if Mastodon devs don’t appear to care, why is everyone else so concerned about it?
Some people think that because Mastodon and Lemmy are both using ActivityPub, Lemmy could gain some users if Mastodon users could interact with Lemmy.
But this seems to overlook that microblogging and link aggregation are two very different ways to interact with content.
Reddit probably has the highest reserve for potential Lemmy users, just because they are more used to link aggregators.
I mean, I’m not opposed to more users from larger platforms, but right now it’s a shitty experience for Mastodon users trying to follow a Lemmy community, and it’s a shitty experience for Lemmy users when a Mastodon user posts into a community too.
You need BOTH sides to make concessions and fixes and changes to make the experience not shit, and like, that will is just plain not there.
I also agree that the use cases of the platforms are wildly different and that leads to some added friction, but if the software actually interoperated well you could probably fix that with just polite social pressure.
But, well, neither side of this “interoperability” is… useful, and Mastodon doesn’t seem interested to fix it.
I also think recruiting new users might be a more useful use of time than trying to just rely on poaching them from somewhere else, but uh, I couldn’t tell you really how that should or could be done.
Agreed with most of your points
I also think recruiting new users might be a more useful use of time than trying to just rely on poaching them from somewhere else, but uh, I couldn’t tell you really how that should or could be done.
/r/RedditAlternatives is basically the one place we have now. We mention Lemmy there regularly, so hopefully over time it will work.
I mean, by themselves, nothing.
The issue is the posting and visibility requirements for a Mastodon post lead to some ugly garbage when translated here. You get shit like
@community @user1 @user2 @otheruser Yep, I agree, this could be better #hashtag #hashtag2 #hashtag3 #hashtag4
Which uh, is not really parsed in any meaningful way, and is 75% noise when put into the format Lemmy uses for a post and/or reply.
@erlend_sh Cool to see things being built with AT. For what my thoughts are worth, I think that having Frontpage posts showing up on Bluesky would be benificial. It’d probably make it feel like it has a lower barrier to entry and increase interactions/discussions across the different communities.
P.S. replying here with Friendica which is taking advantage of similar cross compatibility.
Also, just a curiosity, how good is AT’s cross compatibility without workarounds? Obviously if you guys are considering I assume it works, but I’ve been curious how well things play together. Nostr has NIPs to solve the issue, and ActivityPub is a little tempermental, but with AT’s repo style accounts I’ve wondered how well everything interacts across different implementations.
If I understand correctly, there’s a central pump running behind the scenes in any AT implementation. You feed content into the central hub, and it pumps it out to everyone connected to it. Bluesky itself provides the one major pump that feeds its network right now.
So in that sense, Bluesky is a centralised network with decentralized users.
Frontpage is building a different pump, spreading different kind of content to a different type of platform. So there’s no obvious connection between the Bluesky pump and the Frontpage pump - that’s why they’re talking about bridging in the post.
It almost seems a bit silly - in order for two AT hubs to talk, you need to build a bridge for them. At that point, you could might as well have built an AP protocol and made it work with Bridgy.fed.
Furthermore, all “instances” running Frontpage would process data through the same central hub. If that goes down or they run out of funding, it’s all over.
I’m applauding the Frontpage crowd for trying something new. But I’m not entirely convinced I see the benefit compared to what we’re doing over here.
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.
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.
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
