Wouldn’t that be better? Let me see if I can explain what I mean. Here on the fediverse each server is kind of restricted to what the user can post.
@Mastodon@mastodon.social is for notes
@pixelfed@pixelfed.social for photos (wouldn’t be surprised if it used a note too)
Lemmy only for article objects.
Peertube for videos.
You get the idea.
This way of developing the #fediverse where each server only receive one kind of the objects accepted by #ActivityPub makes it more fragmented it, right? A server should send and receive all kinds of objects and should be up to the client to how to processes those objects.
If an user wants an Instagram-like app just create an account on any service and use and app with that UI, of lager they wanted to see more kinds of objects they should just use another client that supports Note, Article, etc. with the same account on the same server.
Ideally all server should have a shared API.
This fixes #fragmentation, the need to have multiple accounts if you are into multiple kinds of objects/content.
For clarity, it’s not Lemmy that uses ‘Article’. I can’t remember what does, friendica maybe?
Lemmy uses ‘Page’ for posts, and ‘Note’ for comments.
Mastodon uses ‘Note’ for both, with ‘inReplyTo’ used to distinguish whether Lemmy would call it a ‘Page’. It uses ‘Question’ for polls.
Pixelfed also uses ‘Note’, with an ‘Image’ type attachment (I thinks Loops is similar, just with a ‘Video’ type attachment).
PeerTube uses ‘Video’.
Funkwhale uses ‘Album’ and ‘Playlist’
CastoPod uses ‘PodcastEpisode’
There’s no one universal ActivityPub server because the Fediverse is based on a broken promise: i.e. that you should be able to use whatever service, to interact with whatever other one. You very often can’t, because ActivityPub hasn’t been implemented by each platform as some universal thing, it’s been co-opted by each to serve it’s own purposes. Lemmy best federates with other Lemmy instances, following Lemmy’s way of doing stuff, but a good chuck of the Fediverse follows a different model, and is receiving their activity and quietly discarding it because it doesn’t know what to do with it. If all the Lemmy instances suddenly chose to use a different protocol than ActivityPub, most people wouldn’t notice the difference.