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dansup

If I were to build a new #ActivityPub project today, it would be generic.

Giving instance admins the ability to pick and choose what activities to support in a modular way would be awesome.

22 comments
dansup

I would think the modular UI components would be most challenging, as you'd have to make them interoperable with each other.

Could abstract the complexity of mapping ActivityStreams verbs + compatibility to UI components and side effects with a visual drag-n-drop tool.

dansup

If there was a standard way to list capabilities across fediverse software, you could also transform objects to ensure compatibility and limit delivery to compatible instances.

The federation.md thing is nice, but its not machine-readable. If we solved this, we could make the fediverse much more efficient!

smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@dansup there are various SocialHub topics on going beyond FEDERATION.md, both towards machine-readable capability discovery, and a more standardized way of documenting capabilities.

Григорий Клюшников

dansup, I've been talking about this exact thing for at least a year. Like, "I would like to know in advance whether this object supports this activity". This would also make sense to combine with privacy settings, as in, "you can send this activity but only if this actor follows you".

smallcircles (Humane Tech Now)

@dansup the standard way to discover capabilities will eventually be much needed.

But I'm interested in what comes before: the ease-of-development of entirely new application types that are not silo's afterwards, but rather building-blocks for a more task-oriented fedi.

Here thinking that AP vocab extensions represent the domain structure found by DDD and messages represent some of the events from the domain-driven design (event storming) as they travel the network. AP is wire protocol here.

GeneBean

@dansup something like this could help the entire fediverse implement consistent moderation abilities instead of every project starting from scratch.

infinite love ⴳ

@dansup i wanna see an activitypub implementation that's like google tbh

dansup

@trwnh How do you mean? Federated search engine?

infinite love ⴳ

@dansup no, i mean a generic Server with each google "app" being a Client. like Google Accounts, but then hooked up to Gmail and Youtube and Blogger, etc

dansup

@trwnh Oh I see, yeah thats what I mean.

One could enable microblogging, events and groups (each with customizable UI/side effects).

The presentation of such could be silo'd apps like Google or a unified feed like Facebook.

marius

@dansup I think that devs should offload the supported activities on the clients, not on the services side. An activitypub server should accept whatever, and then only the clients will interact/show what they support.

As long as you think in terms of what your AP services supports, you'll end up with needless complexity.

dansup

@mariusor Most implementations have a web client that render activities, are you saying they should support other activities (and implement C2S) that may never be exposed to the vast majority of users?

I'd say the issue isn't so much C2S vs S2S, but rather having unified UI components across all clients.

marius

@dansup I think decoupling frontends from the services is the way to go.

dansup

@mariusor That assumes the frontend can support the constraints of the backend/ActivityPub implementation.

marius

@dansup yes. That's the point. Allow clients to expose to users whatever they want to support. Everything else is ignored.

NFG

@dansup what I always wanted! Give admins some control over their site, rather than a turnkey solution that looks like the rest. 😁 👍

Sebastian Lasse, redaktor.me

@dansup

Yes. Exactly this!
And please don't get me wrong if I was criticising monolithic projects.

It was exactly _right_ to get pixelfed up fast and working. That was most important to incubate fediverse but I think now it's time for generic servers (and diverse clients).

About “modular”:
I am working on github.com/redaktor/widgets-pr [using dojo.io, similar to React]
and all widgets take AP objects natively and then you just need to decide by type(s).
But modularity is hard and takes time :(

NFG

@dansup JFC yes please. All these turnkey apps crimp admin creativity so hard.

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