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.
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.
yea idk, it’s maybe like a fun bonus sometimes, but it’s kinda like trying to put the square peg into the circle hole (where it doesn’t fit, unlike the famous meme video lol)
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
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.
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.
How does your comment relate to my comment?
How does it not relate to your comment?
Seems quite relevant indeed.
To the stance above: if people prefer to have a unified experience managed by a corporation, that’s okay.
There are enough people on the Internet to keep a few places actives. The Fediverse and Blueskey can coexist.
Yes and that’s why I don’t understand their comment and even less why it gets downvoted. They seem to complain about something to me that I didn’t even mention and the topic was not about combining ATProto with ActivityPub or whatever.
Maybe relate wasn’t the right word. English isn’t my native language.
Reading the thread again, I guess it comes from
Initially I thought I wouldn’t need multiple accounts for the fediverse.
Followed by
Right now I’m more active on Bluesky
Some people might have understood it as “The Fediverse failed, Bluesky is better”. As I said, to me it’s okay to prefer one or the other, but some people are less tolerant.
I never said that Bluesky is part of the fediverse for example and the rest of your comment seems to me like it should be directed to OP or devs of ATProto and not me.
Who said I directed my complaints to you?
Why did you write your comment as an answer to my comment then if it’s not directed at me?
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.
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.
I don’t think automatic crossposting is a good idea. However some way to “boost” Mastodon posts onto Lemmy would be good. Mbin has a way of boosting but can’t assign a magazine. Something like that may work though. Mastodon can already boost Lemmy posts.
I think support for boosts is a game changer for interoperability. As a Mastodon user I wouldn’t really want to follow a community even if it was well implemented, but I’m happy to follow users who boost content I’m interested in.
Boosting content is the way posts spread on Mastodon. If anyone follows me from Mastodon they will see all the content I boost; if they enjoy it, they might re-boost to their followers and the ball starts rolling. And that’s how you suddenly get comment sections where Mastodon users are actively participating.
I don’t want Lemmy and Mastodon to interop…
Though luck, they are interpretations already and have been doing it since the beginning.
The first comment I ever made to a Lemmy community was via Mastodon - that’s how I found out about Lemmy in the first place.
