Why fediverse clients reinvent the C2S APIs and don't use ActivityPub? (fstab.sh)

submitted 9 months ago by farcaller@fstab.sh to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I’m reading the ActivityPub spec here and it seems pretty fit for client-to-server communications. Yeah, it might be somewhat bulkier than your typical rest api, but it's more universal, which begs the question: why do mastodon and lemmy both decided to implement custom (and incompatible) APIs for their clients to talk to the servers? Wouldn’t it be more straightforward if e.g. my voyager app talked ActivityPub to lemmy.world which then talked ActivityPub to lemmy.ml or something.

What am I missing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] farcaller@fstab.sh 2 points 9 months ago

I wouldn't quite call Lemmy's protocol much friendly either. I'm trying to implement it and it's a bit of a mess, honestly. There's absolutely no documentation, private database specifics leaking into the public interfaces, and an absolutely horrendous authentication scheme.