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
I think in some ways Mastodon is better suited - if you use the list feature actively there, it gets quite powerful. And personally I quite like the way content gets community curated on Mastodon once you follow enough people.
I love Mbin, but scratches a very different itch. :)
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.
@mark you can’t reply, share or even like a post with a rss reader, I believe one of actititypub goals is to replace rss
personally, I follow an important amount of users and then class them into mastodon lists (tech, politics, movies, news…)
You can reply and interact on platforms from an RSS reader. All an RSS feed is is a list of links. When you click them, you go directly to the platform. When using on a mobile device, RSS readers will even open the app for you to reply or interact with posts.
The fediverse will never replace RSS feeds. They serve a totally different purpose.
@mark why do u want me to use the rss feed instead of my following list ? whats the difference between them for u?
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)
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.
That’s great
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.
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 at you?
Why did you write your comment as an answer to my comment then if it’s not directed at me?
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
@Blaze@feddit.org I just want to note that it’s a feature request on GitHub right now, it was already implemented on KBin (even tho in a bit weird way), so it’s definitely possible
https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/484
@erlend_sh@lemmy.world @FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Thanks!
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.
That’s kind of my comment: pulling from Reddit is probably pointless. If you’re still on reddit at this point, there’s nothing short of Spez showing up and killing your cat that’s going to make you leave.
The Fediverse in general needs to think about being more than just a ‘we copied twitter’, and a ‘we copied youtube’, and a ‘we copied instagram’ and of course a ‘we copied reddit’ collection of things, because you can’t pull people from the thing you’re copying unless you’re better in some way that a normal person will care about.
And I use all these fedi-things to the (mostly) exclusion of the commercial versions, but if we’re being very honest, they’re all carrying a lot of rough edges still.
The Fediverse needs to be able to define and sell itself to people without having to say ‘we’re like x’. If you can’t explain what you’re doing and why someone should care in a way that makes them care, nobody will.
(This is what I get for spending time with people who do marketing stuff, I guess, lol.)
If you’re still on reddit at this point, there’s nothing short of Spez showing up and killing your cat that’s going to make you leave.
There are a few reasons why people on Reddit prefer to stay there rather than move elsewhere
- the other place lacks content
- the other place does not have their specific niche communities
- Reddit is still okay to use
We are kind of working on the first one (and anyway, the only way to get content is to get more and more users)
For the second one, that’s something even harder to tackle. !newcommunities@lemmy.world tries to fill that gap, but same as above, it needs more users.
The third one is the most interesting. At some point in the future, Reddit is going to kill old.reddit. By that time, people will look for an alternative, and if they know about Lemmy, they’ll give it a try.
unless you’re better in some way that a normal person will care about.
Lemmy is better than Reddit on the following points:
- Third party apps actively developed
- No ads hiding as posts
- Cleaner web interfaces
It’s just not enough at the moment, as stated above.
If I were a dev, I’d probably prioritize that awful ‘THIS HAS FAILED!’ error when you search for a new community that your server doesn’t know about because well, new users who don’t know that doesn’t mean what it says are going to walk away thinking something either doesn’t exist or is broken.
I also kinda think that community lists and activity stats should somehow be federated between all the servers that know each other.
Like, lemmy.world knows uncomfortable.business exists, so both servers should know the full list of non-private communities that COULD in theory be federated and be pre-populated in the search results.
And then feddit.org is federated with lemmy.world, so all 3 of the servers should be fully aware of each other’s communities so that a user that lands on ANY instance immediately has a working searchable list of all communities that exist.
Some overhead, sure, but the amount of data here is probably just a one-time big sync and then a small number of updates which is certainly not going to break anything given how chatty lemmy already is.
Yeah, I think Lemmy and Mastodon should be made even more separate than they are currently, they are different platforms with different styles, goals, and uses.
It should be a toggle able setting but whata the issue with @ and # ?
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.
I think tags need to be interoperable so tags become sudo communities
Pseudo?
Yeah thats the one
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’ve found that, currently, this kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ve boosted a few lemmy and mbin comments from my Mastodon account, and it shows up in feeds just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, the parent post of the thread only shows as a link to the lemmy/mbin thread, rather than showing the full text of the original post. So it’s hard for people to see the context of the comment.
Mastodon appears to see lemmyverse comments the same way it sees Mastodon comments, but the top-level post that started the thread is somehow different.
Yeah, it works better for comments than for actual posts for sure. And then they need to work outside of context and all that.
I think sharing of posts might be better suited for quote posts, if that’s ever integrated.
I’m hoping that this will “just work” when Mastodon gets quite-posting. You could take a Mastodon post, and then quote-post it into a community by mentioning that community’s name.
This would create a separate thread of replies, which is good. A person shouldn’t be able to suddenly thrust a bunch of community replies onto someone else’s post. So basically it’s what quote-posting is for, but sharing it with a community instead of just your own followers.
@erlend_sh hello from Mastodon!
@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.
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.
Tried Masto and Pixelfed, left after The Great Sellout to Meta. Trying Lemmy for now but it’s limited in breadth and scope.
I’d like to see a fedi digest app more than anything, gathers it all up and presents it. Then if I want to interact I can sign up for one of them. But first I want to see where things are.
In general, the technically-discerning aren’t going to care as much about quantity, more about quality and features.
I’d like to block every wealthy narcissist and never read their name or see their troubled insane faces in posts, I’m fed up with the narrative on both sides and have other interests.
So if Frontpage gathered it all up and filtered out the paid narratives and shills I get to choose, while letting me follow interesting minds, I’d be very interested.
If it had a prominent link to which instance, it might become clear what instance and software is best for me.
Right now I like Piefed’s ability to filter and not Lemmys militaristic intentional inability to do so.
Masto filtered, but doesn’t migrate well and now federates with the shitasses on Meta, which I don’t want to consort with or support. If I want to sign up for Meta it’s not hard, but I haven’t ever done so and don’t need coercive help from fake empaths running .social instances. I’m not a farm animal, Stux.
I think the fedi got it backwards, new users need to browse first to find what they want. I get it as a techie kind, but right now it’s forbidding to many with all the unknown choices.
If Frontpage, someday, can also interpolate comments and vote between the softwares that survive, that’d be a nice thing to add to a browser that’s already familiar to new users.
But I think it’s way early for that. Kbin is already in the past, Mbin may or may not be a true continuation, the Meta connection nay not be worthwhile for their investors, bluesky is still a pig-in-a-poke for me.
One thing that is missing, again, is a digest to browse.
The Great Sellout to Meta.
Is this Great Sellout in the room with us right now? Because Meta did implement an open protocol into Threads, but it has been widely blocked by other ActivityPub instances. That is not a “sellout”.
Sounds like your principles will only lead you off social media, perhaps the internet entirely?
The 2 largest mastodon instances both misrepresented involvement or intent with Meta to their users, then turned around and federated.
Those were/are the best chance for the fedi to leap forward.
They are the most popular and also now the keast likely to be used by tech people, both because if the association and because they misled their users.
The admins of those, one of which is the masto dev, have arguably done more harm to the fedi than anyone else. People left for bluesky right after the bragconfession and openly posted about why.
So it’s not in the room with me, because I dropped their scene and closed all my accounts.
It takes a moral village idiot to compromise the whole environment just to grab some cash for their subsequent honeymoon. Not unlike current Twitter management thinking, and not unlike social media thought-levels in general.
