Fediverse is still siloed

As I wrote in a previous post, the fediverse is the promise of the federation of many servers running many different softwares. Unfortunately, despite a strong and motivated community, silos remain.

My attempt to remove the friction : a webextension

My attempt to break the silos is named fed-down (yes, I'm terrible at naming things) : The goal of this Firefox extension is to make seamless the process of interacting with content you find during your regular browsing, regardless you're scrolling a fediverse timeline, your RSS feed or randomly finding a good blog post you want to share.

When developing this extension, I discovered how Mastodon and Misskey work. If you want to share content that is not federated with an instance, you can make a search for that content URL and Mastodon/Misskey will fetch it and let you interact with it (like, boost, comment, etc.)

Easy, peasy right ?

Except, I also realized this worked thanks to this part of the ActivityPub spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#retrieving-objects.
TLDR: you can make a special HTTP request to fetch the ActivityPub resource from its URL.

But not all software implement this part of the spec. So if I want to share a WordPress blog article on my mastodon instance, I must cross my finger that someone on the same instance than me is already following the blog actor, so my instance knows about the article I want to share. If it's not the case, all I can do is write my own new status with a link to the blog post I want to share. On the opposite, if WordPress supported the retrieving-object section of the spec, I wouldn't have to worry about having the blog already federated, Mastodon could fetch it at the time I want to share it.

Why do I care ?

I am not happy with the workaround of creating a new status with the blog URL as :

• It breaks the graph of resources that ActivityPub tries to build. There can't be "Actor <me> do Action <boost> on Object <blogpost> ".
• Because of that, it means that reactions I could get on my status will be unknown to the author of the original blog post. That's unfair. It's like taking credit for the original author work.

There will never be an unique client for the whole fediverse.

Federation makes it possible to syndicate many kind of contents from many places but you can't have a single application that can be used to browse videos, explore photo galleries, keep track of community events and follow a stream of micro-blog posts. That's why I think we should improve the way to share content across software, so the content can spread all over the fediverse but still keeps simple excellent apps that focus on one use-case.

Fed-Down is currently a firefox extension for desktop I will continue to improve. I hope to make it an Android application in future so you can boost a photo from your Mastodon feed with your Pixelfed app in a smooth way and help the awesome content reach the larger audience it deserves.

In the meantime, I hope Ghost, WordPress or Peertube will improve their ActivityPub support, so every applications can relay content from others in a single Activity graph.

If you don't follow that blog on the fediverse, you can share your thoughts with me at admin@technosophisme.fr