ELI5: ActivityPub and federation

dellyphy, 11 months ago

As far as I can tell, kbin is currently struggling to connect to many Fediverse instances in a stable manner, but this is temporary. The main developer is already in the process to recruiting help with that.

As far as having multiple accounts, you will have to have them for the moment as different Fediverse servers do not play nice with each other. If you want to interact with kbin content from a Mastodon instance, you technically can but it will be a mess.

You just have to wait for the dev community to work on consensus about how all of the ActivityPub features can play nice with each-other. Probably will take a couple of months.

michaelormonde, 11 months ago

Do you know if there’s something at a protocol level for dealing with grouping or is that something each platform will need to figure out? I’ve made the move recently and the idea of a single account being able to see and reply to content from any place is really cool

But, where I can see that working on a microblogging level like mastodon, where there’s a pretty flat stream of consciousness, does the additional layer of structure for “Reddit style” subreddits / magazine és/ communities make this difficult at an ActivityPub level? For example, take gaming. I understand there will be a gaming@kbin, gaming@lemmy, gaming@xyz etc but following any of those from mastodon is a nightmare because you see every comment in one big feed

I guess ActivityPub just defines how an instance can speak to another instance, and what each instance displays or sends is up to that instance

Mastur, 11 months ago

Your mastodon account is only good for loggin in the specific instance of mastodon where you made the account.
As for posting into kbin from mastodon, you can follow a magazine as if it was a user, for example i'm, @Mastur, whereas this magazine is @fediverse. That's what i've understood so far, maybe if the federation was working properly i could test/try stuff further :(

ArchieHasAntlers, 11 months ago

Yeah, I guess I understand that it can't be the Mastodon "account", but I'm seeing active users on Kbin with activity who are from instances of other sites, like @JamesK for instance, who is on a Mastodon instance. How does that work?

jayeless, 11 months ago

I think that means there's at least one kbin.social account who follows that Mastodon account, or at least that those posts have been boosted by accounts followed by Kbin users. As a result, kbin.social would've generated a local profile for that person so you can see the posts of his that have federated here. Similar to how when you use Mastodon, you can see a version of accounts on other instances' profiles without leaving your own instance.

lusule, 11 months ago

I have an account on mastodon, which I’m following from my kbin account so that I can see my mastodon feed and respond to articles from within this platform without having to switch apps. I could also do the reverse if I wished. This probably helps those mastodon articles be more visible to other users on kbin.social. Others are probably doing likewise.

I think that’s how it works anyway.

PaleBlueDot, 11 months ago

This is blowing my mind (your comment). I'm trying to find an app that will access kbin and mastadon, but now reading the arrangement you're describing with following your own sign-in, I don't know what to think.
Going to load up Tusky and see how that goes.

ArchieHasAntlers, 11 months ago

Can you potentially give a step-by-step guide on how you did this?

lusule, 11 months ago

Go to search and put in your full mastodon address (eg @archiehasantlers @mastodon.social but without the space because I couldn’t figure out how to stop it auto formatting it into a link )

That should bring up your mastodon account as a user you can then click on and follow.