Hey group,

Why is there not a Mastodon client to only utilize the media grid and pack it into an Instagram layout?

When I was exploring Bluesky and its clients a while ago, I actually liked the approach of having one central protocol and then having clients strip different masks over it. The Flashes app, for example, packed the media posts from your regular Microblog-profile into a Instagram-layout, while still keeping all your regular followings.

The federation between Pixelfed instances and Masto instances doesn’t seem to be 100% working to my eyes. Likewise, when I look at my Pixelfed account via Masto client, it doesnt show me the pictures in the media grid.

I know this touches the very core of ActivityPub federation, but during the last years I couldn’t figure out why fedi-networks never interacted completely.

Please correct me if I got something wrong or you know about obvious alternatives that I haven’t stumbled upon yet.

Cheers! Enjoy the sun today!

  • Raphael@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases

    That is not fully correct. The index the data from the different personal data servers, and they host the largest personal data server out there, but you can have your own PDS and interact with other Bluesky users without having to rely on their data.

    This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs.

    Yeah, but why? ActivityPub already provides the “data model” and the API. Internal storage is an implementation detail. Why do we continue to accept this idea that each different mode of interaction with the social graph requires an entirely separate server?

    Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features

    Like OP said, on bluesky is possible to have different “shells” that interact with the network. Why wouldn’t that be possible on ActivityPub?