This was a good read and it’s something I’ve wondered about. The fediverse is sorta built on this promise that everyone will be able to interact across any implementation of ActivityPub.

But that’s not really true. The different types of social media have wildly different implementations, where we have to rely on developers communicating and cooperating with other implementations for everything to work even a little bit

[–] kenbw2@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yea probably similar to how Lemmy and Kbin are theoretically compatible. ActivityPub doesn't guarantee that, it's only because they happen to use ActivityPub in the same way. If one of them changes their implementation, compatibility breaks.

I do often wonder how much it matters that all these platforms use ActivityPub

[–] Blaze@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If one of them changes their implementation, compatibility breaks.

And that's why you want a healthy spread of users across both (and even a third one, one day) platforms. That way they have to keep compatibility with each other to not lose a major share of the userbase

[–] sab@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

You'd also break compatibility with the previous version of your software, so your users wouldn't be able to see any threads posted on any server that wasn't updated.

If you had a really good reason to make this change, chances are this reason would apply to both services and they would move together. If either developer does it out of spite, nobody is going to upgrade their instance and the project would be forked.

And if they were the type to break ActivityPub integration of their service out of spite, why would they use it in the first place? It just makes no sense. I'm not particularly worried.

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