Imho, ActivityPub is a bad protocol that tries to accomplish everything, and ends up being bad at all of it. The spec is also ambiguous in a lot of areas. And major implementations don’t always follow the spec. All in all, it’s a miracle the fediverse even works as well as it does.

One (small) issue is that it assumes there *is* a client outside of the server. Most server apps have both a web UI and an API, and it’s even possible to build an ActivityPub server with no client API at all (microblog.pub was like that, IIRC). I think the ActivityPub C2S API was intended for servers that worked just like you’re describing, but IDK if anyone ever really implemented it properly.

For clarity, it’s not Lemmy that uses ‘Article’. I can’t remember what does, friendica maybe?
Lemmy uses ‘Page’ for posts, and ‘Note’ for comments.
Mastodon uses ‘Note’ for both, with ‘inReplyTo’ used to distinguish whether Lemmy would call it a ‘Page’. It uses ‘Question’ for polls.
Pixelfed also uses ‘Note’, with an ‘Image’ type attachment (I thinks Loops is similar, just with a ‘Video’ type attachment).
PeerTube uses ‘Video’.
Funkwhale uses ‘Album’ and ‘Playlist’
CastoPod uses ‘PodcastEpisode’

There’s no one universal ActivityPub server because the Fediverse is based on a broken promise: i.e. that you should be able to use whatever service, to interact with whatever other one. You very often can’t, because ActivityPub hasn’t been implemented by each platform as some universal thing, it’s been co-opted by each to serve it’s own purposes. Lemmy best federates with other Lemmy instances, following Lemmy’s way of doing stuff, but a good chuck of the Fediverse follows a different model, and is receiving their activity and quietly discarding it because it doesn’t know what to do with it. If all the Lemmy instances suddenly chose to use a different protocol than ActivityPub, most people wouldn’t notice the difference.

I’ve been working with some smart people on something to hopefully become a “federated account” that can be used with any service, and is 100% compatible with OIDC, so its easy for systems to implement as the authentication vehicle: https://fedid.me

Just presented it at IIW and interest is building thus far, so my hopes are high 😉

There have been some platforms that combined form factors like Friendica and mbin

The only problem that I see with this is that images and especially videos take up vastly more space than plain text.

And does ActivityPub include client APIs? I haven’t looked at it, but my completely unfounded impression has been that it only handled server to server communication.

While I think fragmentation can grow into being a problem, trying to standardize things too much can be problematic too, as the developers would be bloating the software for features that the community may use very little, as well as, by consequence of the bloating, the devs being either limited to a design that needs to take into account the quirks of all object formats, or to make some frankenstein monster design to include those different formats.

A more reliable path, I think, is what Kbin (RIP) and its successor Mbin do, to have a section for articles and one for notes. While it’s still more load on the developers and the servers, at least it shouldn’t be as much as having to make sense of multiple formats together, since the two sections don’t directly interfere with each other. This, on a final point, is, to my understanding, and with their respective proportions, what happens with the Linux family of operating systems, where it’s also pretty fragmented, but every once in a while a way to put two different environments together appear, like Wine and Xfce translating Windows and QT5 programs, or AppImage and Flatpak trying to be as universal as possible by depending on as little default dependencies from the host system as possible.

I haven’t developed anything with #ActivityPub, but have read a little bit of the spec. I would love to hear the take from developers making use of it.

(Sorry for the mention in any case)

@silverpill@mitra.social

@hongminhee@fosstodon.org

@dansup@mastodon.social

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io

This is what I also think, would make the #fediverse much more viable this way.