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Flipboard has begun testing ActivityPub federation of user accounts (flipboard.com)

submitted 11 months ago by Chozo@kbin.social to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Mike McCue - Hello Fediverse. I'm posting this tonight from my federated Flipboard profile! We're now testing our #ActivityPub integration starting with my account. You can follow me here to see all the stories I'm curating about things like startups, photography and of course, the #Fediverse. Curious to hear your thoughts on how this is working. We’ll incorporate your feedback as we make more progress on federating Flipboard. Stay tuned for lots more soon.

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[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 46 points 11 months ago

Well, if they're doing what many other places are doing, which is implementing with a focus on mastodon, then you won't be able to. Same thing happened with the Wordpress plugin recently, AFAIK.

The issue is that mastodon does users and lemmy does groups (ie communities). From that I could tell, the wordpress plugin for ActivityPub implemented their federation as a user. This way, it'll work more or less "naturally" on mastodon. Already you can see an issue with this IMO, as any given blog is not necessarily a single user: often a blog hosts content from multiple users, in which case federating as a group could make more sense.

My bet is that flipboard are doing the same, even though it makes even less sense for a news aggregator to not have an ActivityPub feed that is organised around a group. Of course I could be completely wrong about this. But the force to optimise for mastodon, which doesn't do groups well at all, is very real and so I'd be willing to bet I'm right.

Either way, the point still stands that mastodon's size is distorting what the fediverse looks like toward its idiosyncrasies. Which makes a lot of sense for those looking to plug in to the fediverse such as flipboard, but by the same token raises rather significant concerns about the quality and propriety of mastodon's stewardship and influence over the fediverse.

Beyond all of that though is the question for lemmy and users here as to whether they'd be interested in being able to follow users more or less like a microblog? Kbin is trying something along those lines. Facebook (and friendica on the fediverse) have had a mix of user and group driven structures for a long time now.

My personal take is that lemmy's general reddit-like design could create a rather interesting platform if it were to allow user's to create their own personal "communities" which could be subscribed to like any other. The idea being to not lean into the microblogging idea (where the character limit here is something like 50,000 anyway, so "micro" is inapplicable) but instead to lean into the idea of a blogosphere in which people's personal communities would become places for posting longer form content with the purpose of starting conversations.

[-] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Could easily be fixed if they allowed User based federation the same way Kbin and Friendica do. Probably won't happen though unless Desilantis and Nutomic pull their head out of their ass or the community gets fed up with them like people did with Kbin and created a community driven fork (like Mbin but for Lemmy) that implements what the community works on democratically.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago

I've asked the devs about it before. They completely saw the potential value in it but admitted that it would be a lot of work and so isn't a priority at the moment.

From what I've gathered, working with ActivityPub is a pain in the ass. Doing so with a statically/strongly typed programming language seems to only add to the pain so going with Rust may be substantially slowing them down compared to those working in Ruby and PhP (as Mastodon and kbin do). So I believe them that it would be a lot of work.

As for kbin, I'm not sure how they got user based federation going but IME I've always found it to be a bit weird and concluded that it is mostly sucking up microblog content to fill up the magazines (which is a cool idea in itself). I've spoken to the kbin dev about it and they it is working properly if you know which page to go to but it still didn't seem quite right to me. So though I could be wrong I'm not sure kbin has proper microblogging or user based federation just yet.

With friendica, well that's a product of Mike Macgirvin who is basically the fediverse's old unsung hero that appears to be making better things but without any interest in pushing their popularity ... point being that it's no surprise that friendica (or Hubzilla or Streams, his other works) has something the rest of the fediverse should.

A lemmy fork has been spoken about for a while but I've not seen anyone willing and able take the idea seriously. Not sure it would change the core devs approach though, they seem pretty happy doing what they want to do.

The thing with forks, or at least unfriendly/hard forks, is that they probably damage the fediverse more than help it. By my estimate the first line on the fediverse's tombstone will be "failed to cooperate well". I suspect there's way too much of a "hacker ... I'll do it my own way with blackjack and hookers" culture and less of a "lets build together" culture, where the former tickles personal needs and gripes and itches while the latter requires making compromises for the greater good. IE: If someone is capable of developing user based federation on top of lemmy then they should probably think about how they can pull that into the mainline code base before starting their own prideful fork. Just my two cents.