I’ve been seeing these “why not federated <something>” popping up here from time to time, so i figured I could make two suggestions (a suggestion and a question, really) that have been popping up in my mind as well.
Let me ask the question first, in this post, and make the suggestion on another post, to keep the discussion clean:
Wouldn’t it be better to have the fediverse be a server only (like mail, or usenet - as federated as can be) and then have clientes like mastodon, lemmy, whatever… be just clientes to that server?
The post would have fields like author, date and time, subject or title, text resume, text content, image, link, video, x, y, z, … Then clientes would fetch whatever they are interested in (maybe mastodon would focus on author, date, image and text resume, pixelfed on image, peertube on video, lemmy on all of them… a blog would fetch the author, the date, the title, possibly text resume to use as lead, and text content and display that as a blog entry…
Information could, then, just flow via jason, xml (xmpp, why not)
Maybe I’m being naive here, but would very much like to understand why.
Of course the server would authenticate and distribute to other servers and to clientes what they ask for.
The image is a little provocation, of course ;-)
I agree that would make sense. I think it’ll come with time.
To others, I’m pretty sure what OP is suggesting is just a generic activity pub server that all the various front ends could use.
I’m pretty sure this is what the original (?) authors of the AP spec intended and that’s why they specified a client-server protocol. My understanding is that (almost?) no one uses that API though, they all just specify their own.