Why fediverse clients reinvent the C2S APIs and don't use ActivityPub? (fstab.sh)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I’m reading the ActivityPub spec here and it seems pretty fit for client-to-server communications. Yeah, it might be somewhat bulkier than your typical rest api, but it's more universal, which begs the question: why do mastodon and lemmy both decided to implement custom (and incompatible) APIs for their clients to talk to the servers? Wouldn’t it be more straightforward if e.g. my voyager app talked ActivityPub to lemmy.world which then talked ActivityPub to lemmy.ml or something.

What am I missing?

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I wouldn't quite call Lemmy's protocol much friendly either. I'm trying to implement it and it's a bit of a mess, honestly. There's absolutely no documentation, private database specifics leaking into the public interfaces, and an absolutely horrendous authentication scheme.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023

39 points (93.3% liked)

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