There are some Fediverse services which are incompatible or don’t work that perfectly with each other (e.g. Lemmy on Mastodon). So I was curious on why that could be a problem with ActivityPub compatible software in general. I mean, apparently just implementing ActivityPub may not be enough.

And if there are some Lemmy devs reading, what are some technical difficulties for Lemmy on that regard? Thank you for making this awesome piece of software btw!

  • nutomic@lemmy.ml
    13·
    2 years ago

    In addition to what @[email protected] says, another problem is that each software prefers to implement things in their own way, and not in the way that would be most compatible with other software. This is partly the fault of Activitypub, because its such a generic protocol that the same information can usually be represented in many different ways.

    Another big problem is funding and thus developer time. Only few devs are paid to work on Fediverse software, and its not enough to keep up with all the work. So compromises have to be made, and often a nice user interface or other features are seen as more important than perfect federation.

      • mathias@lemmy.ml
        4·
        2 years ago

        Indeed. I just now came back here to Lemmy to see if that had changed, seeing as I could find my Lemmy user (this account) from my Akkoma instance, and I could press “follow” over on Akkoma. That apparently sends back to Akkoma that my Akkoma user has “requested” to follow my Lemmy user, but I can see no trace of that over here at Lemmy, and here is no way to “approve” followers.

        It would be great if I could follow my Lemmy user from my other Fediverse accounts and then re-post (boost) my entries from Lemmy to the further Fediverse without having to make a separate post about it. Much like Pixelfed works.

          • Lionel C-R@lemmy.coupou.fr
            1·
            2 years ago

            I can’t even follow communities apparently, I can click the follow button but then when I come back to the community it’s unchecked again.

              • mathias@lemmy.ml
                1·
                2 years ago

                Wait, what? I tried to follow a couple of Lemmy groups from my Akkoma (fork of Pleroma) account. It shows as ”requested follow” in Akkoma. A day later I still haven’t actually followed the groups in question. You say there is a switch somewhere I can flick? In Lemmy, or in my other service(s)?

                • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  Admins have a setting in most modern microfedi platforms that allows them to enable something called authorised fetch. It’s a security feature that makes it harder for blocked instances to access your content despite the block. But, a side effect of it, is that it creates issues for fediverse platforms that don’t support authorised fetch, and lemmy is in that group.

                  So, your instance admin can disable authorised fetch and that will generally fix the problem, but I’m not sure if there are any akkoma specific compatibility issues above and beyond that.

          • mathias@lemmy.ml
            1·
            2 years ago

            Yeah, but even though that is cool I’m not sure how well that will scale when Lemmy picks up lots of users.

            From a Lemmy users perspective: You have a cool link that you wish others get to see. To post it you need to pick a group where it fits in. It might not be the groups you normally hang in. Or it is, and the group might have 100’s (in the future maybe 1000’s) of contributors and the group stream is moving rather fast.

            From another Fediverse service: That Lemmy group you started following is flooding your home stream as it is really active. Sadly you also published a Lemmy post in a group you don’t normally hang in, but you now have to follow to be able to boost your own post in it to the further Fediverse.

            I can imagine how that quickly creates both noise and scalability issues.