PieFedIntegration with the broader Fediverse
submitted by
cabbage
Congratulations on having made such a great tool, even in its early phase! It seems very solid.
I'm curious about the long-term plans for the project: Is the idea to work strictly with the Threadiverse (similar to Lemmy), or are there plans to integrate more with the microblog platforms (similar to Kbin)? Any particular difference in approach to Fediverse integration vis-a-vis the two main platforms?
Thanks :)
It's a bit too early to say. At the moment it's just me making these decisions but in 6 months time, who knows.
Currently, I just want to get it working with Lemmy and kbin and until that's decent anything else is a distraction. Afterwards I'll be interested in any platform that supports the 'Group' actor type, like Peertube. For example Peertube channels will be represented as Communities at this end, which can be joined. This will provide an intuitive and fluid way to integrate that content with few UI or backend changes for PieFed. Friendica also supports Groups, so that might be another low-hanging-fruit kinda opportunity.
The thing with the more twitter-style ActivityPub projects is they send activities to individual users inboxes a lot, whereas with the threadverse it's all shared inboxes. So there's a fundamental difference in the way they use the protocol which makes scaling those projects much more difficult. My gut feel is that adding full microblog support would increase the size and complexity of the codebase by at least 50% and triple the server load. Maybe much more. It just doesn't seem worth it.
Personally I find microblog platforms to be very addictive and corrosive of my attention span, and often produces knee-jerk reactions in myself and others. It's an endless stream of random disconnected nuggets of often quite emotionally-laden content and I'm just not sure it's a mentally healthy environment, or good for society, or democracy. Even without corporate influence, it's still kinda inherently bad. I much prefer longer-form content, a more measured pace, branching comment structure and the quality control that up/down-voting gives. So I'm far more enthusiastic and hopeful about the threadverse.
Thank you for the thorough and thought-through answer! I agree that Peertube channels might be more sensible targets for integration than Mastodon posts - and there's no reason why every platform should aim to do everything. Looking forward to see how it will develop. :)