Kalcifer

Kalcifer, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

i thought the protocol allows for all 3… upvotes, downvotes and ‘likes’

Do you have a source for that, by chance? From what I can see in the documentation for the ActivityPub protocol, it only states:

6.8 Like Activity

The Like activity indicates the actor likes the object.

The side effect of receiving this in an outbox is that the server SHOULD add the object to the actor’s liked Collection.

There doesn’t appear to be any other client to server interactions for different types of likes. Afaik, Lemmy extended the ActivityPub protocol to add the downvote.

Kalcifer, 5 months ago

There are already Lemmy instances that don’t allow downvotes, like beehaw

TIL

Kalcifer, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

They may want to like something, but not up vote it.

Isn’t that the point of the “Add activity” (Section 6.6 of the ActivityPub Documentation)? I think it is equivalent to a “Favorite” in Lemmy.

They may not even care about the voting system and not want to participate.

This point feels moot, to me.

Also on a technical level, it’d be messy to make the two compatible.

They already are compatible, though, aren’t they? That’s the whole point of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon, of course, won’t accept downvotes since, afaik, that is an extension made to the protocol by Lemmy, but likes/favorites/upvotes should federate normally.

Kalcifer, 5 months ago

I think this is a non issue while we are small.

For sure, but I feel that it is better to think hard on an issue while one has the luxury of non-urgency.

Kalcifer, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Well ActivityPub isn’t 1:1 interoperable all the time

It will be interoperable up to the base spec (assuming, of course, that both services adhere to the base spec).

Like you’re not going to see the upvotes/downvotes of a Lemmy post when viewing from Mastodon.

If both Mastodon, and Lemmy adhere to the spec, then they can interoperate. If Lemmy’s upvotes are federated as ActivityPub like activities, and Mastodon intereperets like activities as favorites, then there should be no issue. Downvotes will certainly not federate as Mastodon doesn’t use them, and they don’t exist in the base spec.

What does interoperate is the post and comment content which is the important part

Likes federate as well. See Section 6.8 of the ActivityPub spec.