Flipboard has begun testing ActivityPub federation of user accounts
Flipboard has begun testing ActivityPub federation of user accounts
Mike McCue - Hello Fediverse. I'm posting this tonight from my federated Flipboard profile! We're now testing our #ActivityPub integration starting with my account. You can follow me here to see all the stories I'm curating about things like startups, photography and of course, the #Fediverse. Curio...
Mike McCue - Hello Fediverse. I'm posting this tonight from my federated Flipboard profile! We're now testing our #ActivityPub integration starting with my account. You can follow me here to see all the stories I'm curating about things like startups, photography and of course, the #Fediverse. Curious to hear your thoughts on how this is working. We’ll incorporate your feedback as we make more progress on federating Flipboard. Stay tuned for lots more soon.
So, how do I get their content in Lemmy?
Well, if they're doing what many other places are doing, which is implementing with a focus on mastodon, then you won't be able to. Same thing happened with the Wordpress plugin recently, AFAIK.
The issue is that mastodon does users and lemmy does groups (ie communities). From that I could tell, the wordpress plugin for ActivityPub implemented their federation as a user. This way, it'll work more or less "naturally" on mastodon. Already you can see an issue with this IMO, as any given blog is not necessarily a single user: often a blog hosts content from multiple users, in which case federating as a group could make more sense.
My bet is that flipboard are doing the same, even though it makes even less sense for a news aggregator to not have an ActivityPub feed that is organised around a group. Of course I could be completely wrong about this. But the force to optimise for mastodon, which doesn't do groups well at all, is very real and so I'd be willing to bet I'm right.
Either way, the point still stands that mastodon's size is distorting what the fediverse looks like toward its idiosyncrasies. Which makes a lot of sense for those looking to plug in to the fediverse such as flipboard, but by the same token raises rather significant concerns about the quality and propriety of mastodon's stewardship and influence over the fediverse.
Beyond all of that though is the question for lemmy and users here as to whether they'd be interested in being able to follow users more or less like a microblog? Kbin is trying something along those lines. Facebook (and friendica on the fediverse) have had a mix of user and group driven structures for a long time now.
My personal take is that lemmy's general reddit-like design could create a rather interesting platform if it were to allow user's to create their own personal "communities" which could be subscribed to like any other. The idea being to not lean into the microblogging idea (where the character limit here is something like 50,000 anyway, so "micro" is inapplicable) but instead to lean into the idea of a blogosphere in which people's personal communities would become places for posting longer form content with the purpose of starting conversations.
So by destroying twitter and moving people to mastodon, elon musk is ruining the fediverse
Now his plan makes sense
/s
Could easily be fixed if they allowed User based federation the same way Kbin and Friendica do. Probably won't happen though unless Desilantis and Nutomic pull their head out of their ass or the community gets fed up with them like people did with Kbin and created a community driven fork (like Mbin but for Lemmy) that implements what the community works on democratically.
I found this works on lemmy world for finding their profile.
It seems kbin has an @ for the name as well as the site while lemmy just has an @for the site they are from.
I never actually considered the idea that established websites implementing activitypub to join the fediverse would be an important part of its growth. This is fascinating!
I've been talking for a while about how the fediverse might dethrone youtube - which is maybe the biggest challenge it faces - to become the default form that people use to consume content, but I've only ever thought about it in terms of collapse and replacement. I don't see youtube implementing activitypub any time soon, but maybe if more sites fo it and it becomes a key selling point that might start to tip the balance more.
I'm interested to see a Fediverse implementation of a YouTube alternative. Being able to link a Microblog on Kbin to a Mastodon post and a Community post on a YT alt would be HUGE.
Uh so you know that bot that gives you alternate links anytime someone posts a YouTube link? Yeah that's what that is.
Neat! I have to admit I've never heard of Flipboard (I'm not known for my broad experience in social media). From the summary I read just now it sounds like Flipboard is a kind of news aggregator? If so, that's right up the alley of sites like Lemmy and Kbin instances. So a good match for federating here.
It's basically an RSS reader (with a bunch of curated feeds) with a nice interface. I've used it off and on and found it to be no better or worse than a lot of other mainstream news readers.
I only know Flipboard as bloatware on a Samsung phone.
For those wanting to follow them from kbin their profile is @mike@flipboard.com
That gave me a 404 error. Though this worked for me.
Edit nvm Livus beat me to it.@Gamers_Mate that works for me too but it's because we're both on kbin.social specifically.
Thanks, that didn't work for me. Try @mike
okay you can exist
Exciting!