Hey group,

Why is there not a Mastodon client to only utilize the media grid and pack it into an Instagram layout?

When I was exploring Bluesky and its clients a while ago, I actually liked the approach of having one central protocol and then having clients strip different masks over it. The Flashes app, for example, packed the media posts from your regular Microblog-profile into a Instagram-layout, while still keeping all your regular followings.

The federation between Pixelfed instances and Masto instances doesn’t seem to be 100% working to my eyes. Likewise, when I look at my Pixelfed account via Masto client, it doesnt show me the pictures in the media grid.

I know this touches the very core of ActivityPub federation, but during the last years I couldn’t figure out why fedi-networks never interacted completely.

Please correct me if I got something wrong or you know about obvious alternatives that I haven’t stumbled upon yet.

Cheers! Enjoy the sun today!

  • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    and building an “everything server” that implements every message you might want to send is prohibitive just in terms of complexity and scope.

    It is not. A server that “speaks” the ActivityPub is not that difficult to build, I’ve done it. The complexity is in getting the data from the social graph into and creating a good UX for users who are too used with the “app-centric” mentality.

      • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
        2·
        12 days ago

        Or are all of the books objects stored on activitypub and I get the data from the social graph itself?

        Not “stored on activitypub”, but each book could be represented with RDF (it could be something as sophisticated as using DublinCore or as simple as just using isbns to uniquely identity the books (urn:isbn:1234556789) , and then each activity for “CombatWombatEsq read a book” would be an activity where you are the actor and the book is the object. Then it would be up to the client to expand that information. Your client app could take the ISBN and query wikidata, or Amazon, or nothing at all…

          • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
            2·
            12 days ago

            Once you achieve any kind of scale, whoever your client is querying to get the book data for those kinds of queries is going to block you

            You know that the whole of wikidata can be copied with just a few hundreds of GBs, right? There are plenty of examples of community-driven data providers (especially in the *arr space), so I can bet that there would be more people setting up RDF data servers (which is mostly read-heavy, public data sharing) than people willing to set up their Mastodon/Lemmy/GoToSocial server - because that involves replicating data from everyone else, dealing with network partitions, etc…

            Also, there are countless ways to make this less dependent on any big server, the client could pull specific subsets of the data and cache data locally so the more they are used the less they would need to fetch remote resources.

            Think of it like this: a client-first application that understands linked data would be no different than a traditional web browser, but the main difference is that the client would only use json-ld and not HTML.