It kind of makes me think of how odd it would have been if many of the old forums named themselves like bookclub.phpbulletin.com, metalheads.vbulletin.net, or something.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that, obviously, but it’s struck me as another interesting quirk of fediverse instances/sites. Generally as soon as you visit them you can tell by the site interface or an icon somewhere what software they’re using.
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Uh, OK. I have a Lemmy client on my phone. It doesn’t work with anything else you mentioned. Those are different apps with different features. I need to know if a server is a Lemmy instance, not Mastadon, etc.
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You do care, though. Mastodon is a social network. You want to know if this server is part of that social network. Lenny is the same, even if “social network” doesn’t apply to it in the traditional sense.
Not all the networks on the fediverse interoperate, and that’s not even the goal with activitypub. All servers of the same network should interoperate, but Pixelfed doesn’t and shouldn’t need to integrate with Lemmy, for example.
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Idk what to tell you then. Not only is that not how activitypub works, not all fediverse networks even use activitypub. Idk where you’re getting your definition of fediverse, or how you think that’s even possible. You can’t have every app/network support every feature of every other.
Imagine I make a fediverse MMO turn based RPG. How is a Lemmy app support to present that? How am I supposed to consume that from a mastadon server? Mastadon shouldn’t need to support turn based MMORPGs, and MMORPGs shouldn’t need to support streaming video.
There is not only is there no common API for fediverse networks, there isn’t even a common protocol.
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Maybe I don’t understand your position then.
Fediverse doesn’t make any claims for SSO or shared user accounts between server types. And servers aren’t required to interoperate with servers of other types. And clients aren’t required to interoperate with multiple server types.
It’s nice when servers and client do Interop between types (what I’m calling networks for lack of better word), but that’s not really fundamental to the fediverse, and is pretty rare. Afaict the only requirement is that servers of the same type can interoperate with eachother and user accounts from other servers of the same type are addressable.
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Isn’t this just the difference between an API and a protocol?
The payload of a message for one social network will be different based on the capabilities of that type. There are API architectures that are discoverable, like HATEOAS, but that only gets you so far (and that example is based on HTTP not Activitypub).
I don’t really see anything wrong, in the absence of a standard body, for each social network to define its own activity type, since they typically have some degree of unique capabilities anyways.
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