I just had that problem when you browse to a Mastodon post and ⭐️ it, or try to follow someone. The choreography is clumsy, and the kind of thing that will hinder mainstream adoption of ActivityPub.
acct is IANA official and used behind the scenes with webfinger. It’d be dead-simple to enable browsers looking up an app to handle acct: URLs: an ActivityPub client.
It’s trickier to think of how to handle posts, given the discussion about Lemmy/Mastodon interop… and the ActivityStreams spec has a dozen object types! But I think I’m going to want only as many clients as necessary, and one sounds great, so I’m interested to hear what people are thinking at an infrastructure level
In practice, that’s what the Fediverse is doing already. The Threadiverse (Lemmy and Kbin) are using ActivityPub but use objects and behaviour that’s nothing like Mastodon’s. Mastodon, in turn, doesn’t implement the objects Lemmy uses as posts, which causes tons of “why are all Lemmy posts a title and a link” comments when the two interact.
I have no idea how Friendica and its Facebook-like model implement ActivityPub but I’m sure it’ll have differences and incompatibilities of its own.
Furthermore, a big problem in the current iteration of the Fediverse is that the ActivityPub part of it mostly consists of incompliant servers. Try running the ActivityPub/Streams test suite on your favourite Fediverse server, and try to find one that actually passes. Most servers seem optimised to only use the ActivityPub/Streams parts that make basic federation work and not much else.
Honestly, trying to unify all of these different apps is rather pointless. I don’t think Mastodon users want their apps to suddenly become Reddit clones and I don’t really see the point in adding a general timeline to Lemmy either. Then you need to start thinking deeper about functionality that goes beyond “a bunch of text and links”. What does Lemmy do with “Question” or “Travel/Move” objects? Do Lemmy apps need to embed map software now? And how about “Offer”, are we adding market place support to Lemmy? And dear lord, how would a Lemmy app even deal with being informed about stuff like “John is Alice’s brother”.
I think we can make usable apps that implement the various representations used in ActivityStreams, but based on how apps like Fedilab are solving these problems, I think a generic approach will just be a worse experience for everyone. Right now, everything is either a Twitter clone, a Reddit clone, a Facebook clone, or something bespoke that few other platforms can interact with.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the modality differences between microblogging and forums, and still working out my thoughts, but I definitely agree that generic solutions end up failing everyone.
I’d like to believe that today’s practice isn’t yet so cemented that we can’t aspire to better. I think there’s a lot of interop work even among conceptually aligned projects – there are a couple of FEPs i haven’t digested yet, eg FEP-1b12: Group federation (as well as, I just found, one about URLs)
I think the targets I’m looking for are a unified feed that can fan out to specialized clients for detail, and a system that embraces the power of links with minimal friction. EDIT oh, and maybe something that makes it easier to follow specific people across different modalities without having to rediscover them – although maybe that’s adjacent to the topic of this thread