I apologize if there’s posts on this already. I’m still new here, and it’s very confusing.
I’ve read through the wikipedia entry, blogs, stack overflow posts, lemmy threads, etc… however in all of them, I feel like everyone glosses over how one goes about subscribing or even viewing content from other “packages”. For example, I have an account on lemmy.world, and am using the lemmy mobile app. I’d like to view / subscribe / participate in content from Misskey. Is this possible?
Everything I’ve read suggests it is, given that both lemmy and misskey leverage the same protocol, though I can’t figure out how that works.
I can see how the incompatibility can happen, despite the common protocols, each package serves a different purpose. For example, what should be shown when you subscribe to a video hosting service through a Lemmy instance? An aggregated list of thumbnails? A list of videos? What is a video hosting service to a link aggregator.
Despite having a common protocol, it does seem impossible to have one app handling everything.
Thank you for your reply.
There is one app I know of that is for generic ActivityPub activity, https://docs.microblog.pub/
But as you said, in the more complex UIs like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, it would be a challenge to make the different forms of content fit the same structures. Micropub isn’t exactly nice to look at, but it is basic enough to be able to serve the different types of content… kinda
While I agree with the general premise, this is actually something a link aggregator would handle well. Translating, say, a YouTube video to a Reddit or Lemmy post is just title to title, video as the link, description as the text, replies as comments. Despite being shown very differently and used for different purposes, they’re about as similar on the backend as any two formats. Converting Tweets to Reddit posts and vice-versa is more difficult.