Is there a reason why all the services, that use the ActivityPub protocol don’t have a unified API?
None of the mastodon apps allow me to log in with a lemmy/kbin account.
Also none of the lemmy apps allow me to log in with a kbin account.
Even though kbin has both mastodon (microblogging) and lemmy (threads, communities) functionality.
Also, Pixelfed recently introduced “login with Mastodon”, but all it really does is just create a new user on it’s instance and copy over the mastodon followers and profile info.
Why can’t we just have one account to rule them all?
> With extensive work, these tools can all be made to work together under a single username. Every tool needs to be made aware of every other tool, and a lot of the actual federation code needs to be externalised to an all-encompassing server. This can be done without breaking any spec and without becoming incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, but it’ll require a LOT of work.
You basically summarized my original plan for communick. The basic idea is:
Unfortunately, the amount of people willing to pay for commercial providers of social media is embarrassingly small, so I am stuck at step 1 and the best I could do is to build a SSO system for Matrix/Mastodon/XMPP, to let people use the same credentials on all “communick.com” servers.
I’ve been thinking of writing up a script to deploy a single Mastodon+Matrix+Kbin+whatever service through Keycloak and something like Ansible, but OAuth2 implementations seem to mostly focus on big social media companies rather than arbitrary SSO. Matrix has native SSO support, but even XMPP doesn’t seem all that well set up for federation (maybe an XMPP bridge would help?).
I don’t have time to put into this idea and I don’t think it makes much sense as a business model, sadly. There isn’t much interest in hosting your own socials. That said, with Threads and Tumblr coming in, I can see a potential for mainstream users. I don’t think they’ll be interested, but imagine a tech brand like LTT coming in with a federated forum for customer/community interaction, Matrix for chat, Mastodon for social media outreach, all behind one secure login system, delivering content and community to the Fediverse, Threads, and Tumblr. Perhaps integrate this with a Twitter API client for an appropriate price to help web care resolve the signatures at the end of messages (“^FL”) by using the domain name as a verification system and the agent’s username rather than adding signatures everywhere.
It’s going to be a tough sell, but with a bit of luck and a few years of growth I think it may happen. You’d also need to loop in platforms like Bluesky over course, which will be more difficult but it’s still technically feasible.
I was also considering taking a lightweight Matrix implementation (Hydrogen?) and stuffing it into a Lemmy frontend to provide more secure DMs. That’s more work to maintain long term, though.
> imagine tech brand like LTT coming in with a federated forum for customer/community interaction
Exactly! This also applies for old media as well. Why is it that the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Deutsche Welle, Globo, Telemundo, Forbes et caterva haven’t still set up their own AP servers? I guess they seem as more interesting to go to Twitter and bitch about Elon Musk instead of just emptying the platform? Why can’t they become providers of a service and say “all subscribers get a free account”?
Currently, the entire Fediverse is equal to what, two percent of Twitter’s userbase? Maybe 10% if you take out all the Twitter bots? Twitter is used for outreach, but with nobody to follow you, there’s no incentive for companies to join the Fediverse.
This can change once some social media with actually relevant user bases start joining the network (Threads, Tumblr) but until then I wouldn’t expect any companies to bother.
I don’t think it’d be a good idea to put journalists on an instance with their publication, though. Sure, they should use the verification feature Mastodon provides, but you don’t want a journalist’s socials to be in the hands of their boss.
Complaining about 𝕏 makes sense for as long as there are more active people on there than there are on any of their competitors. People don’t want Twitter do die and wither away, they want it to go back to the way things were before mister “make se𝕏ual assault cases to away by giving her a horse” took over.
> the entire Fediverse is equal to what, two percent of Twitter’s userbase?
I’d honestly say it’s even less and I’d even wager that the amount of bots here are even higher (percent-wise) than Twitter. I’m working on a search engine for the fediverse now, and I was surprised with the amount of bot accounts and mirror servers that I am finding.
> you don’t want a journalist’s socials to be in the hands of their boss.
I feel quite the opposite. If a journalist is really independent, then they can go on to host their own content. But as long as they are writing under the editorial guidelines of some larger institution, I want this association to be well defined and transparent.
> People don’t want Twitter do die and wither away.
I am fundamentally opposed to any ad-funded business. I honestly believe that moment a lot of the issues in our society can be traced back to the moment that we made it possible for people to make a living by just collecting eyeballs instead of focusing on quality work at a small scale. So, yeah, I very much want Twitter/Facebook/Google to die and wither away.
My limited view on the Fediverse makes it seem very human operated, but I’ll trust your judgement given your experience in these matters. I don’t trust the statistics (2 million active Lemmy users, but Lemmy feeds drying up after two or three pages? No way!) but the accounts I do see just feel more genuine, I guess.
As for journalists, verification is key. I haven’t seen any journalist that wouldn’t voluntary write the publication they work for in their bio. Mastodon provides a way to verify your relationship with an arbitrary web page (i.e. https://news.example/people/f.m.lastname) by providing a special value in the page HTML, regardless of what server they’re on. I think that would be an excellent solution.
I agree with you on ad based services, but I don’t think we’re in the majority here. No matter how much people complain about ads and tracking, they just don’t want or can’t afford to pay for the services they’re using. This only leave predatory money making tactics if you want to make money off the content you create. When 𝕏 dies a slow death, Bluesky’s enshittification will begin.