Mastodawn

What if... you had one Fedi account on a generic headless #ActivityPub server that simply hosts and federates your data... and had C2S UIs for microblogging, long form writing, media editing and sharing, link aggregation, games, fitness tracking, and so on, that all used that same Fedi account. Technically, it's a similar concept as ATProto (but no relay and app view) and Solid Pods (but no RDF).

It seems possible... if we can improve the AP C2S API/protocol sufficiently.

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Ben Pate 🤘🏻Feb 25

@steve

I love this vision. One hurdle I see is the lack of content types + the ability to represent them in HTML.

Bandwagon is my best use case: Albums and Tracks aren’t a standard data type. I could push those into my own AP server, but other servers wouldn’t know how to represent them correctly.

For this to work, we need a restricted subset of HTML for generating previews of unknown content.

This feature exists in oEmbed (optional) but is poorly supported on the Fediverse.

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Steve Bate

@benpate The approach I described requires us to think about servers differently. A generic AP server would only store and federate data, and would not render any user-facing content. The C2S clients would know how to render the content because they were coded to do it. Different clients might render the same content very differently for different purposes (although I see value in having the ability to share UI components too).