I don’t quite understand a lot of the details on how the implementations work.
In what ways is AT better or worse than ActivityPub? Are there different versions of ActivityPub? Are there improvements coming to either to make them better (or compatible)?
My current understanding is
- AT makes it easier to move accounts (according to them), but AT is controlled and maintained by BlueSky, and they are a for-profit company that can mess with the protocol in the future, which goes against the central idea of decentralized social media
What other cool technical details are there?
I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!
Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.
The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.
Mastodon has promised to add groups soonish, so that will likely improve interoperability with Lemmy a lot.
For your first issue, subscriber counts will be fixed in Lemmy v0.19.0
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1440
Preview here: https://voyager.lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1
Yeah this one has an issue open, you could join the discussion if you have any ideas, this is a big one
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818