Hey 👋 if you don’t know us already, we’re building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that’s to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I’ve tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it’s not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
Unpopular opinion: IDK why people want perfect interop so much, I have a Mastodon account and a Lemmy account, big deal. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than this. The formats are different enough that you’re better off having separate accounts for microblogging and threadiverse.
Interop for similar platforms is a great feature, but for dissimilar platforms I don’t think it’s actually necessary just a novelty. Also I think people try to push this on new users as some big, useful, important feature, but I think it only confuses the new users.
Also I noticed most of the time when people complain about ActivityPub interop issues, it almost always ends up being Mastodon’s fault lol. Probably because they were early to the party and didn’t have to worry about interop and standards much back then. At least I hope it isn’t malicious lol.
Don’t think this opinion is unpopular at all. It makes sense for platforms that are similar to interop.
Hypothetically like Youtube interop with Peertube (video platforms) or Instagram interop with Pixelfed (photos). Or Threads, Reddit and Lemmy (forums). And Mastodon and Twitter (sorry, but just making a point here 😁)
But yeah, see no reason for interop between platforms with completely different purposes.
yea idk, it’s maybe like a fun bonus sometimes, but it’s kinda like trying to put the square peg into the circle hole (where it doesn’t fit, unlike the famous meme video lol)
Why isn’t anyone mentioning Kbin? Isn’t that basically already a lemmy/mastodon mix
Tried Masto and Pixelfed, left after The Great Sellout to Meta. Trying Lemmy for now but it’s limited in breadth and scope.
I’d like to see a fedi digest app more than anything, gathers it all up and presents it. Then if I want to interact I can sign up for one of them. But first I want to see where things are.
In general, the technically-discerning aren’t going to care as much about quantity, more about quality and features.
I’d like to block every wealthy narcissist and never read their name or see their troubled insane faces in posts, I’m fed up with the narrative on both sides and have other interests.
So if Frontpage gathered it all up and filtered out the paid narratives and shills I get to choose, while letting me follow interesting minds, I’d be very interested.
If it had a prominent link to which instance, it might become clear what instance and software is best for me.
Right now I like Piefed’s ability to filter and not Lemmys militaristic intentional inability to do so.
Masto filtered, but doesn’t migrate well and now federates with the shitasses on Meta, which I don’t want to consort with or support. If I want to sign up for Meta it’s not hard, but I haven’t ever done so and don’t need coercive help from fake empaths running .social instances. I’m not a farm animal, Stux.
I think the fedi got it backwards, new users need to browse first to find what they want. I get it as a techie kind, but right now it’s forbidding to many with all the unknown choices.
If Frontpage, someday, can also interpolate comments and vote between the softwares that survive, that’d be a nice thing to add to a browser that’s already familiar to new users.
But I think it’s way early for that. Kbin is already in the past, Mbin may or may not be a true continuation, the Meta connection nay not be worthwhile for their investors, bluesky is still a pig-in-a-poke for me.
One thing that is missing, again, is a digest to browse.
One thing that seems to go unappreciated in the comments is the simplicity of this interop proposal: It is essentially about enabling quote-posting of link-aggregator(Groups) posts.
Bluesky + Frontpage will work this way, and I believe it’ll work exceedingly well. If the ap-net corner of the fediverse isn’t interested in this kind of interop, fair enough. To me however the promise of seamless interop between my social apps was what brought me to the fediverse, so that’s the version of the fediverse I will pursue.