I was under the assumption that I can use one fediverse account across all ther fediverse apps, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
I.e. I downloaded the mastodon android app and tried to select kbin.social as the server, but it gives an error.
Same for jerboa, it won’t let me connect to kbin.social, saying invalid credentials.
Is this something on the roadmap or am I simply wrong with my assumption?
ActivityPub has 2 parts: The Server to Server API (S2S), which is how instances communicate and is the backbone of federation. and the Client to Server (C2S) API, which is a way for instances to communicate with an app/website. Unfortunately, mastodon made the decision early on to go the proprietary API route instead of using the C2S for app development. The rest of the microblogging fediverse had to implement the mastoapi so that they could share app support. Lemmy and kbin don’t use the mastoapi, which is why they aren’t compatible with mastodon apps and they don’t even implement the same API so their apps won’t be compatible either.
Ideally, lemmy and kbin will migrate to a common API so their apps can be compatible. Even more ideally (and the original goal of the protocol), lemmy and kbin would use the C2S so that they could work with standard AP apps that also work with any compliant AP service.
aah, thx for the detailed explanation… So everyone doing their own thing, kinda defeats the purpose, or at least makes it harder for app developers to take care of all the different apis
Identity federation isn’t the main point of the Fediverse, though. Federation is just meant to distribute content and facilitate communication. So you can have a book blogger manage their reviews and bookshelf on BookWyrm, a vloger can upload a video on PeerTube, and a city government can share water outage updates on Mastodon, and someone can interact with that content from a single interface and account of their choice.
Yes exactly. If we want universal apps, we need to convince implementers to use the C2S. I also think the huge push to get native apps for kbin/lemmy was way too premature. I’m worried that’s gonna lock in their current APIs and make transitioning to the C2S even harder.
I think we could start with an api alongside the existing one, and have it downward-compatible until everything is migrated, bit by bit.
That’s interesting. I’m not a huge supporter of it, but wasn’t account portability one of the reasons that Bluesky created their own AT protocol?
I don’t know anything about Bluesky, but this has nothing to do with account portability. ActivityPub doesn’t easily support account portability; your account is always on a single server. There are mechanisms to move your account to another server, but they’re incomplete (you can’t migrate your existing posts, etc).
The C2S is about allowing native apps that can work with any ActivityPub implementation. So in an ideal world, you could use a single app to access lemmy, kbin, calckey, pleroma, hubzilla, mastodon, wordpress, etc.