Hey, I am currently trying to understand a bit better what the Activity Pub allows and what it doesn’t as I am preparing a presentation on that topic.
On Lemmy I can join other servers without having to recreate an account. Does that also work for across Activity Pub supporting software? Could I join a PeerTube page and then post there? Could I upload videos? Could I join Mastodon or Pixelfed and post images?
I think you can follow Peertube channels and write comments but not post videos. And you can’t access Mastodon nor Pixelfed.
Lemmy is centered on the concept of ActivityPub groups. While Mastodon etc are about individuals, they don’t use that concept (with their toots) and since following accounts isn’t implemented in Lemmy, there is no way to properly interact.
Though there are other software projects. MBin combines both. And Piefed wants to get there, eventually. They already hook into a few more things, but Mastodon or Pixelfed accounts currently aren’t properly supported either. But Mastodon people can write replies to our posts.
It’s a bit complicated. And I think ActivityPub is fairly low level and broad (I think). So it’s really down to the individual implementation and whether two projects agree to do something in a compatible way. And write code for the specifics of some content types.
you can’t access Mastodon
Small nitpick. Lemmy communities are present on Mastodon and can be followed and replied to by Mastodon users. One can see a comment written by someone from Mastodon. We only can’t follow a Mastodon user or Mastodon tags from Lemmy
Example: https://mastodon.social/@VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml/115167313865117114
Also a Mastodon user can follow a Lemmy user.
The replies will federate but not the threads. So for example, the Mastodon user will get notifications about replies to their comments and the Lemmy user will get notifications of the Mastodon user. However, the two users will see the conversion displayed quite differently, especially if there are more than two users in the conversion.
Is this a real follow or is this just a redirect? It redirects me to my profile.
For some reason if you copy the url when on Mastodon.social and paste it into browser it redirects.
If you want to see this community on Mastodon, go to some mastodon server, search for
fediverse@lemmy.worldand scroll down. You will find your post with our responses etcThanks. That worked.
Like others have said, you can follow accounts from those servers. If they present themselves as group actors, as Lemmy (unlike Mbin for example) doesn’t allow following non-group actors.
You can’t however just go to their website and log in with your Lemmy account. ActivityPub doesn’t have a built-in mechanism for this, but some platforms like Mastodon iirc have a solution and there have been efforts made to standardize something. But there’s nothing supported by the Lemmy side of the fediverse yet afaik.
If you want to subscribe to a group actor from Lemmy but can’t find them, try searching for the full URL from its home instance. That should tell it to go and fetch the actor. If you want a Lemmy-like experinece but also the ability to follow non-group actors, switch to Mbin. Same applies there, if you can’t find an actor on your instance, search for their full URL on the search page and it should fetch them from their home server.
Quick clarification, because I can’t tell from your words if you’re confused about the concept of federation or not 😅
If by “join” other servers you mean use their site as if logged in, or like you have an account there, then that is not federation. That’s single-sign-on (SSO) and is not a feature of the fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube, etc). That would be like the “login with Facebook” or Google buttons around, where by having this account on site A, you can instantly signup on site B without making a new password or anything. That’s not how federation works.
Federation is like email. I can have an email with GMail, you can have one with Proton, and someone else can have Yahoo, and I can send an email to you anyway. It doesn’t mean I can “join” Proton with my GMail account, it doesn’t mean I have a Yahoo account, it means I don’t need a Yahoo account to communicate with Yahoo users.
But, if by “join” you meant “join a community” as in subscribe to updates from a group on another server, then most other people’s answers apply. I wouldn’t call that “joining a server”, though, because servers host many communities and you’re not joining all of them.
Joining a community works like joining a mailing list. Activity Pub allows accounts on different servers to communicate without an account on their own server, so my account would send a message to your account saying “I’d like to subscribe to this community, send me a message whenever something happens on it”, and then the other server says “okay, will do”, and then after that will periodically send my server messages saying “hey, here’s that update you asked for”. And when I comment, like right now, it’s like an email being sent from my server to yours, and then your server puts it into the history.
This allows my server to present the community from your server to me, without me having account on your server. Without me having to “join” your server, I’d say.
And so I’d say this also answers your broader questions. Since Activity Pub doesn’t allow me to join other servers, it also doesn’t allow me to join other sites.
So a Lemmy post may be compatible with a Mastodon message sent to a group or something, that’s only because the messages Activity Pub sends are similar. But PeerTube is different software with different buttons, and the existence of those buttons on PeerTube doesn’t change anything about what buttons Lemmy has, and I can’t “login” to a PeerTube server with my Lemmy account, so I don’t gain any special abilities outside of what Lemmy can do.
The only way it would be possible is if Lemmy added a feature for uploading videos that sent the same kinds of messages to other servers that PeerTube sends. Then, if they did that, someone on a PeerTube instance could see these messages coming from Lemmy and interpret them on their server as a PeerTube video or something.
But all that Activity Pub allows is exchanging of information between sites. For them to interoperate in a way that makes sense, they need to exchange the same kind of information.
Good response! You were right. I thought that it would work similarly to SSO i.e. your instance works as an identity provider and your content is then generated on the other page, not send there.
Alright, so following the mail metaphor: lemmy is unable to send a video attachment so it can’t allow you to upload videos to peertube; however, activity pub could allow for that.
I think I have to read up on the exact definition of “group”.
Maybe I should create a new post for this but has there ever been discussions regarding SSO? So you have one identity across all fediverse services?
Maybe I should create a new post for this but has there ever been discussions regarding SSO? So you have one identity across all fediverse services?
This comes up from time to time, but usually not for what you want. Pixelfed and PeerTube and Lemmy and Mastodon are actually pretty different experiences. They don’t really do the same thing, they don’t appear to have the same verbs and nouns. So using one to talk to the other is actually a little weird, not because we’re trying to make walled gardens, but just because the focus of Lemmy is on the threaded topic, and the focus of PeerTube is comments on videos in my playlist.
The fact that they can cross-talk at all is kind of an accident. Each system wants to federate with itself, and so they have a protocol to do it. And because it’s an open protocol, anyone can use it. And it is intentional that any compatible software should be able to use it, so Mastodon and other microblogs can cross-talk, that’s on purpose. But with these different “kinds” of services, they all picked the same protocol because it already existed, it already worked, and it met their needs. I don’t think the people making Lemmy really intended PeerTube users to use it, even though it’s sometimes possible in particular ways. They’re compatible because they both used parts of the same protocol, and so when you put them together they happen to have overlap, but that’s almost a coincidence.
The reason SSO sometimes comes up is actually to solve a UX problem that’s plagued the fediverse since the beginning. If I’m a user of lemmy.ca, and I’m looking at lemmy.ml because I got there from a link it Google out something, and want to comment on what I see there, I can’t. Not directly. I can’t click the join button or follow a user or any of it, because this site is not my site. I have to first go to my site, where I have an account, and then find this content on my site, and then interact with it there. That sucks and has always sucked. So one of the proposals people have pitched to fix it is if I could login to lemmy.ml directly with my lemmy.ca account, then I could drive it remotely, in context, while maintaining my actual account somewhere else.
The downside of this is that a whole bunch of random sites have tokens for me, every instance has way more “users” than users, and if any one of them has a security incident then it doesn’t just affect the users of that instance, because that instance also has keys for a bunch of other random instances. And overall the way I’d login on the remote site is to type my home site’s address, to kick off the SSO login, but if I’m doing that anyway I could also type that in and just have it redirect me there natively. So not great.
If we’re talking about using SSO just to only have one credential, this is actually better handled with normal, existing, SSO. Like OpenID or whatever. If Lemmy and Mastodon and PeerTube and PixelFed all allowed creating an account with an existing SSO solution, of which there are several, then you can already create an account on each of them using the same identity provider and not make any new accounts. This is likely cleaner than requiring each of them to be, themselves, an identity provider just so they can all login to each other so you can start with any one of them natively, but from there only have one identity for all the rest. That would add a bunch of extra requirements to being a valid implementation, and maybe lead to some bad or insecure identity providers, and not give that much benefit in return.
But I love SSO as a concept, so we should definitely support the much simpler thing, which is that all FOSS websites support SSO standards, not for fediverse reasons, but just because it’s nice in general. For me 😛
Oh, I agree. I meant SSO in the second sense: that there are external Identity Providers that you can use to create an account at different servers hosting different kind of fediverse experiences - be it Lemmy, PeerTube, Mastodon or … I understand the issue you are describing first, but I haven’t had that problem yet. Sounds like it could be fixed with a simple redirect - but I guess it is not so easy to figure out whether you need a redirect in the first place.
Yeah, the redirect is easy. The hard part is that I’m just some unauthenticated user on whatever.net or something and I clicked the 👍 button. That could pop up a box that’s like “hey, what server is your server?” and then I type it in. That could be done, but it’s kinda crap, and we don’t have anything better 😅
I think for now the easiest solution would be a browser extension “TakeMeHome” that automatically redirects you when you enter a foreign server that is federated with your home server. Should be pretty easy to implement.
The fediverse has been around for a while, and fediverse people are more likely to want browser extensions than most demographics, so honestly that may already exist!
I think I have to read up on the exact definition of “group”.
Represents a formal or informal collective of Actors.
has there ever been discussions regarding SSO?
Don’t know about Lemmy specifically, but there has been discussion on SSO in the fediverse in general. There is an FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which lists some implementers. I have also heard the client-to-server API part of ActivityPub could be used for this, but I don’t think projects usually implement that (it’s optional). It should be theoretically possible to provide SSO for any fediverse project which has an API with authentication. I think. So sign in with Lemmy should be possible, but it’s up to those other projects to implement it.
Cheers! Would be cool to see SSO happening as it would simplify joining multiple fediverse instances (PeerTube, Pixelfed, …).
Alright, so following the mail metaphor: lemmy is unable to send a video attachment so it can’t allow you to upload videos to peertube; however, activity pub could allow for that
I’m not sure that would be the correct metaphore. Lemmy can send video attachement. But your lemmy account is not allowed to upload video to peertube so you can’t send any video.
There is also an economical reason : a video is ressource hungry.
So it is limited to watching peertube video. Let’s imagine 1000 lemmy users uploading video to peertube…
But this is a peertube limitation, right? Activity Pub itself provides the video information and peertube - due to whatever reasons (most likely the economical reasons you mention) - decides to not use that information / reject “the mail”. Is a message sent is only stored on the receiving end or also on the node I am sending it from?
Images and videos on Activity Pub are sent as direct links to the host.
So you can send text comments from Lemmy to peertube that will be replicated, and watch the video by “following” direct links to the host (it is done automagically in your browser or app).
This explanation on how images and videos are embedded while text messages are copied is really helpful!
With lemmy account you can only join “groups”, so other Lemmy communities, or equivalent piefed or nodebb.
With a Mastodon account you can also join groups (Lemmy etc), but you can also follow single accounts from any mastodon, pixelfed, peertube etc instance.
Why then having a Lemmy account? The interface, how you see the posts, depends on the software. Lemmy is reddit-like, mastodon is twitter-like etc
If you want to upload your video to a peertube instance, then you need an account on that instance
Also, mbin allows you to follow individual users as well as groups.
In my opinion this is the biggest shortcoming of the ActivityHub ecosystem. That’s not to say it should have been solved by now, since I don’t know how to decentralize authentication safely. And after using it for a while I’m not sure I want a single account.
But it is a challenge facing newcomers and those trying to recruit them. This group of services is already tough to explain sometimes, and telling them it all interconnects just muddies the waters when you have to explain that it’s not the way they expect.
On Lemmy I can join other servers without having to recreate an account.
Not sure what you mean by “join”. You can participate on other Peertube servers, just as you can participate on other Lemmy servers. If you sign up on another server, you will need another account. But currently Lemmy does not support following PeerTube channels. PieFed does.
As for Mastodon, The threadiverse (Lemmy + Piefed, etc) is not intended to follow individuals so it does not have that capability. However if a microblog user replies to a threadiverse user, you will be able to see and interact with that as well.
Hope that helps. Happy to hop on a call or something with you to share what I’ve learned for your presentation.
Definitely helps! Regarding the call offer: I might come back to it once I have a pretty good outline for the presentation to double check/clarify the information I’ve found.
@Snoopy@feddit.fr, I think it works for Piefed?
On piefed you can join :
- Peertube channel : https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/topic/peertube/mondelibre and crosspost them.
- in late 2025 : follow mastodon account.
- follow Pixelfed : not supported.
- later in 2026, mobilizon : we can create event post. The base is ready for futur federation with mobilizon : https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/291
On mbin, you can join :
- peertube channel
- mastodon account
- pixelfed (probably supported but i don’t know well mbin)
Lemmy
- peertube : i got bad result with peertube but maybe over time they solved it, i haven’t retested it. It was possible but you had to manually retrieve the video
- mastodon : not supported.
People from mastodon, pixelfed…can post on lemmy, mbin, piefed. They need to mention the forumverse community. Eg :
@forumlibre@jlai.luI often recommand this formatting on mastodon :
The first paragraph will be the title
And i chose the community where i would like to post, eg : @forumlibre@jlai.lu
The second paragraph will be the body text
#someHashtag
Another note : markdown may not be supported accross fediverse software. For example : https://piefed.social/post/1004603
Peertube on Lemmy was AFAIK recently fixed.
Great, i’m testing it. Well there is some federation issue. Some of these works. It’s hard to give a good diagnostic.
Thank you! @VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml fyi
No. For each Mastodon, Lemmy, or Peertube server you want to join, you need a separate account on the server.
Not true. You can follow Peertube from the other systems. You DO NOT need an account on each. Is it easier to use the platform natively? Yes. But you can follow threads on Lemmy from Mastodon and what not.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that when OP asked about “joining” each platform, they wanted to use each platform natively.
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