We are thrilled to announce the official release of ActivityPods 2.0, a framework and platform that allows users to create a single account for multiple decentralised social applications while also providing developers with the tools to build and integrate these applications.
  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    281·
    1 month ago

    Holy shit…I haven’t tried it yet, but this sounds like one of the first ideas I pitched when I got here. One account, multiple platforms!

    How do I do this? Can I do it with this account?

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        161·
        1 month ago

        Well…that kind of defeats the purpose then.

        It needs to be compatible with ALL the things. Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, hell throw Bluesky in there! Get all the fediverse things interconnected. Otherwise, what is the point of having a service that connects all the things, and then making it compatible with none?

        • Dame @lemmy.mlEnglish
          6·
          1 month ago

          That’s not true it’s compatible with anything running ActivityPub. It currently has build a Mastodon client as a demo that’s why right now you can use it with Mastodon. They built Mastopod in a week. Part of the pitch it showing devs how relatively simple it is to build apps on top of it. So if someone builds a Pixelfed, Lemmy etc app then you absolutely can use it

        • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
          3·
          1 month ago

          To be fair, it seems that the way it works behind the scenes is using SSO and OIDC (see https://docs.activitypods.org/app-framework/backend/application-registration/ ) so applications would need to support that before.

          Lemmy only added this three weeks ago, https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2930 and pixelfed still doesn’t support it directly as per https://github.com/pixelfed/ideas/issues/14

          Likely the reason they went with Mastodon is because the support for the above is more mature there, but seeing as this is ActivityPub-based I think in theory it should work with Lemmy et al. (Doesn’t rule out there being app-specific bugs and such that need to be ironed out, but that’s often the case for new releases regardless.)

          That said I’m having a bit of a hard time following the docs. If I’m reading https://docs.activitypods.org/architecture/authentication/ right you may not be able to use a lemmy.world account as your credentials - it seems like there’s some configuration on the “application” end to enable this, meaning the lemmy.world admins would have to turn it on for this to work. (But if you had it turned on and successfully working elsewhere and then posted as that other account to lemmy.world, it would federate as usual.)

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 month ago

        It’s how it SHOULD work.

        Like if I comment on someones picture on pixelfed, and someone replies to my comment, the notification should go to my inbox.

        Then, if I post a video on peertube, and 5 people leave comments, those comments should go in my inbox.

        And if 30 people leave replies to my Lemmy comments, I should have 30 comments in my inbox.

        And that inbox? It should be one inbox. One account. If I see the notification for pixelfed, and I click the context button, my browser should take me to that pixelfed post. Then, if I click back, to the inbox again, and click context for the peertube comments, it should take me to that video.

        That’s what I imagined when I first heard of the fediverse.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          32·
          1 month ago

          From a privacy perspective it’d be annoying if the default weren’t one-identity-per-website, though. That’s how it ought to work. If the user then wants to instead use a single one (akin to how OAuth logins allow you to use a single identity for auth purposes) that’s on them, but it should not work that way without explicit enabling.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      71·
      1 month ago

      Glad you like it.

      About testing it, not sure, hopefully someone more knowledgeable about it will jump in

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 month ago

      Yeah I was going to say, is there a tool for keeping multiple of these pods around so I can use different identities for (some) different sites?

  • astrsk@fedia.io
    12·
    1 month ago

    Wait, this sounds awesome! I haven’t had time to dig into it more yet but does this mean I could host my own “pod” allowing my data to stay where I want it and be backed up how I want, while allowing my fediverse identity to be used on multiple different federated services?

    • Dame @lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 month ago

      Correct. You have access controls to your POD thus the data within it. As long as there’s an app built for a platform compatible with the protocols ActivityPods is compatible with, which are currently ActivityPub and Solid protocols it will work. It’s not just microblogging and not only compatible with Mastodon. So you can host your POD which would be best or even use a provider which you still have access controls. It’s like renting a locker or storage pod

  • cum@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    Glad to see it is built on top of the Solid protocol. Cuz I was going to say it sounded familiar!

  • patrick@lemmy.bestiver.seEnglish
    41·
    1 month ago

    Meh, just run several associated services and keep the same username on all of them. Nothing is interoperable, stop trying to force it. And a rogue app with bad user data handling practices is still going to leak your data, even if you store your copy of the data securely.

    My fediverse accounts are always “patrick@<service>.bestiver.se”. I currently am only running Mastodon/Lemmy and a few supporting services (e.g. a link manager - https://bestiver.se/@patrick), but I’m adding more as I get to them. Pixelfed, Peertube, Loops(?), Piefed…

    Adopting this ActivityPods thing looks like it will require each Fediverse project to make what I’d guess are fairly significant changes to their user data handling, and none of those projects are properly funded for this. In fact what this actually seems to be doing is asking every other Fedi app to build on top of their user data API.

    I applaud the attempt at building a new standard in the Fediverse, but I doubt it’s going to happen.

    • Laurin@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      I think there are some misconceptions here. ActivityPods does not build a new standard but actually implements existing ones instead (ActivityPub and Solid).

      So if you are a dev, you can write your own app on top of ActivityPods and it gives you the ActivityPub support almost “for free”. This gives you: (1) freedom of the users where they have their account when logging in to your app (like a sign in with google) but the user data is stored with the user’s personal online datastore (POD) not with the app (2) the possibility to deploy multiple instances of your app which can be useful to build communities independent of the account provider. Also (3) as an app dev, you don’t need to worry where to store users’ data.

      For an existing ActivityPub application (take mastodon for example, we have an alpha stage app called mastopod which is intended for microblogging), there is nothing to do actually. If someone builds an app that supports the same types, for example the Article or Event type of ActivityPub (/ActivityStreams), they can understand each others activities. You could for example imagine an app that functions like an aggregator for all types of Activities and all people you follow but you might want your blogging app to only show you Articles. And another app that is nice for organizing events.

    • Dame @lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      All it would require is someone making an app on top of it the same way the devs built Mastopod. They built it on top of SemApps which makes it relatively easy to built apps on top of ActivityPods