this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2021
13 points (88.2% liked)
Asklemmy
49251 readers
627 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hope the opposite i.e. using Matrix protocol for federation instead of ActivityPub, this would solve a lot of problems with federation and enable chats like you wish.
What problems would this solve with federation? Seems like it would cut us off from sites like Mastodon
Did you not realize that if your instance has not yet interacted with another and you want to see the profile of a user you will never see his old posts but you will only receive new ones if you click "follow"? Or the busted counters that are different depending on how your instance is connected to the others? Practically with ActivityPub the information hardly spreads, with Matrix you have the assured consistency.
And then the Access Control Lists, they are not supported by ActivityPub so no stuff like private groups. When it comes to Matrix,they are built-in.
And Matrix defines APIs for both server-to-server federation and client-server communication, while ActivityPub is currently only used for federation. Client-server ActivityPub APIs have been discarded in favor of thin-client APIs such as Mastodon's.
Matrix continually adds new features. ActivityPub is stopped and too generic, it could be expanded in many ways for different use cases but each group of people works on it separately and for now without big results (see ForgeFed).
P.S. nothing stops someone from implementing both Matrix and ActivityPub on the same server: the former to federate with other Matrix servers and the latter to keep the federation with Mastodon & Co.