this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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As a developer for a Lemmy app, recently I've felt Lemmy become more and more fragmented resulting in a poorer than usual user experience. And the base user experience is already poor. I'm mostly just venting but man is the fragmentation annoying to deal with as a developer and as a user. :/
Let's stop working on "Lemmy app" , "mbin app", "PieFed app", "Mastodon app" and just embrace ActivityPub as the single API.
I think that would just increase the fragmentation LOL. It's like that XKCD comic
It's the complete opposite of that.
"Use ActivityPub directly for interacting with the social web graph" is the same as saying "Use HTTP and HTML directly to interact with the world wide web".
The reason we don't see different websites using different versions of HTTP, or that someone can open a HTML document on pretty much website and read its contents is because we are building the application on top of the protocol layer.
But ActivityPud is very barebones so you will need to implement a lot of features. In doing so you are effectively creating a new Lemmy.
Indeed, I am. But to be perfectly honest, I'm doing a lot less work that I original thought in the server side, and when I get to start working on Mastodon compatibility, I will probably just change the internal implementation of mastodon's js sdk.
Right but you understand how this makes fragmentation worse right?
How? My server would be able to talk with any of the existing projects and talk native ActivityPub. It can even bridge to other protocols without forcing them to change anything on their side.
There is a difference between Mastodon and Lemmy because Mastodon is user-centric and Lemmy is content-centric. I wrote about this here
My point is that you can have a "content-centric" application separate from the "user-centric" application, but they are just different ways to represent and interact with the data in the social graph and as such they don't need separate APIs.
yeah, i think embedding Lemmy content into Mastodon is trivial, because you just show the post. But the other way around, embedding Mastodon posts into Lemmy could be a bit more tricky, because in what community do you show the post? There could be a virtual community for each Mastodon server, like when you post something on mastodon.de, then it's displayed on the lemmy community /c/all@mastodon.de
What do you think of this?
In ActivityPub terms, there is no such thing as a "Mastodon posts" or "Lemmy communities". You just have "authors" and "audiences". In effect, it would mean that you emulate a "post to a community" by writting a post with the community as the "audience", and anyone that follows the actor that represents the group (equivalent to the Lemmy Community) would find the posts.
so you are saying that each author should represent their own community that they populate with posts each time they post something
I am not sure whether "represent" is the right word here. What I mean is that all posts have a "recipient" (the audience).
For Mastodon, you have public posts where the recipient is literally a "special" audience, called
https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public. If you want to see a private message to alice, you just change the "audience" to contain only thehttps://example.com/aliceactor URI.To post to a community, it's the same logic: if you are posting on
fediverse@lemmy.world, then the message has "https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse" as the audience. This message is then sent to lemmy.world and processed.Ok, so from a user's perspective, where would Mastodon content appear in your Lemmy feed?
You do understand that I am describing a whole different client, right?
There is no "Lemmy Feed", just "posts sent from individuals to a group" vs "posts sent from individuals that are broadcasting without any specific audience"
How this presentation layer would work would be entirely up to the developer/user. I can envision people that might prefer to have a separate threaded-view for group posts like we have in most forum sites, but I can also envision people that will prefer each post appearing in a "feed", like what Facebook does for groups. I can also envison such an application providing a "image gallery" for people tthat want to see only pictures, like Vernissage does.
My point is, it would be completely up to the user how to see the data.
phone apps can't use activity pub as that's a server protocol so if you want a good mobile interface you generally speaking need a rest-y api that an application can query. yes, lemmy and piefed both feature PWA frontends that can be installed to your homescreen, however on older phones this can be an extremely suboptimal experience as PWAs tend to require more RAM than native apps.
You don't need to get rid of the server. All I'm saying is that we can have a server that uses the ActivityPub API directly instead of these ad-hoc APIs for each different use case.
i don't understand how that negates the utility of a mobile app that presents this information. also i'm not saying to get rid of the server-client paradigm, not sure what you're talking about
I am saying is that we can have a mobile app that can do anything that Lemmy does, but without requiring a "Lemmy API" to do it.
Any "Lemmy client" could in theory read and create posts/comments/votes/moderation reports directly by interacting with the actors outboxes. The same for any "Mastodon" client, or any "PeerTube client".
Okay but conversely: Lemmy was always going to die off. I've been shouting this for years and recently stopped because it was just too annoying to people. Note, it's not truly going to "die off" in the same way that Reddit was never going to "die off" either - just get more enshittified and less popular and less worth visiting.
So this was never going to not happen. At least with the creation of PieFed, the Threadiverse has a chance to succeed?
That's just my two cents anyway:-P.